I have this strange problem at which I have spent stupid amount of time. To build my portlet, I haven't used sdk and I am using my own ant script do the job. It works all well till this wierd situation.
I am basically using a lot class from portal-service.jar to change role settings etc. When I include it in my build path and deploy it again. It doesn't get deployed. On shell it shows the deployment, below is the log:
Copying 1 file to C:\liferay-portal\tomcat-6.0.29\webapps\ch1_HelloWorld
Deleting directory C:\liferay-portal\tomcat-6.0.29\temp\20121016060846753
06:08:47,887 INFO [PortletAutoDeployListener:81] Portlets for C:\liferay-portal\tomcat-6.0.29\deploy\ch1_HelloWorld.war copied successfully.
Deployment will start in a few seconds. 16 Oct, 2012 6:08:56 AM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig checkResources
INFO: Reloading context [/ch1_HelloWorld]
That's it! Later it doesnt show (as it does normally) that the portlet is available to use. In browser, under the "add tab", the option is never shown. What can be the issue for this. The portlet is a simple hello world portlet that access role information
Answer
I am basically using a lot class from portal-service.jar to change role settings etc. When I include it in my build path and deploy it again. It doesn't get deployed. On shell it shows the deployment, below is the log:
Did you put portal-service.jar to WEB-INF/lib? If so remove it from there and add it to some other (my_project/lib) directory than add it to build path.
Also make sure that after deployment portal-service.jar is not in your deployed WEB-INF/lib. Better yet, first undeploy than redeploy.