On Oct 27, 2007, at 11:32 AM, David Jencks wrote:
The admin console needs to be lightweight and portable so it is
based on Pluto. The Jetspeed MBE (as currently designed) would
interfere with the deployment of admin console extensions.
Adding something to the Geronimo plan to activate the Jetspeed
MBE instead of just looking for a WEB-INF/portlet.xml sounds like
a reasonable solution. Let's pursue that approach.
+1 as I see many situations where the Pluto Admin Console will
still be used even when Jetspeed or Liferay are installed.
I haven't looked into exactly how the admin console plugins get
added to the admin console but if they are geronimo plugins they
have already gone through the deployment process and there is no
chance for the jetspeed MBE to see them as the deployment machinery
is not activated at all when a plugin is installed.
I see your point. Limiting portal apps to installation via plugin
would offer an advantage that developers can pick the appropriate
MBEs at build time, giving them & us (the MBE provider) fine grained
control over every step in the deployment process.
While using MBEs has proven to be a very successful approach for
deploying services and enterprise apps in Geronimo I am concerned
that the lack of any standardization or a specification for deploying
portal apps could make this difficult and fragile in the case of
portlets. My observation has been that deployment into most portals
(Liferay, Pluto, uPortal, and even Jetspeed itself) is based on the
concept that the developer creates a standard WAR and uses the
Portal's runtime or build-time utility for preprocessing it. Then
the portal deploys the preprocessed WAR using the app server's
standard deployment mechanism, or relies on the end user to do this.
Can/should deployment of portlet into Geronimo be an extension of
that process? I have been inclined to follow that approach so far
but there may be disadvantages I haven't thought of.
BTW, I have started using the term "console extension" instead of
"console plugin" because adding portlets to the admin console doesn't
currently require them to be packaged as plugins. A console
extension can be installed as a plugin or it could be deployed like
any other ordinary WAR. I hope most developers will offer their
console extensions as plugins because they are easier for end users
to browse and install. But I think the latter option (deploying
console extensions as a WAR) will be important to developers that
don't want to create plugins for reasons such as the reliance on
maven to build them, the sensitivity of plugins to Geronimo server
versions, etc.
Best wishes,
Paul
