I am developing a WebSphere portlet in IDEA 11. The portlet is using some methods defined on portal. I don't have the production environment compiled classes or jars on my PC but I have the source code.
Can I somehow "attach" the .java files to my projects in order to build a war file that will be deployed into the production environment? Or do I have to build the production sources first (this seems to be harder since there are lots of dependencies)?
If this is just to test something while you await the JARs/compiled classes, you can likely do this by only bringing over the API (e.g., referenced interfaces that hopefully don't have external dependencies). Then, open up the compiled WAR and remove those .class files manually to avoid collisions with the real code on the server.
The biggest problem is that you will definitely run into issues trying to limit the exposure to the real code, unless the rest of the code was setup nicely to expose an API that has very limited dependencies.