Gang, As of today, we have rolled a J2 based corporate portal into production and it is live. Due to the demands of our marketing and graphics design folk, I had to generate complete Decorators from the ground up. In the end, I was unable to use the default Navigation Templates due to the highly customized nature of our portal interface. I simply rolled the templates inline into the Decorators instead of customizing the Jetspeed Navigation Templates. I took this route because, as I understand it, Decorators are to be deployable as a unit and I felt that I was better served if I made our custom Decorators stand alone. Additionally, I did not have to solve the locale issues for our portal, so I did not need to consider shifting "LeftToRight" to "TopToBottom" dynamically.
I spoke with David about this and he urged me to post this to the dev list to open up the discussion of dependencies between Decorators and Navigation Templates. Based only on my limited exposure to J2, I can throw in a few options to start the discussion: 1 - Make Templates and Decorators deployable in the final version of the product. This does not eliminate cross dependencies, but does open up all templates for customization. 2 - Add Navigation Template support within Decorators. This would allow Decorators to stand alone, but might need some kind of fallback mechanism across decorators to promote reuse. 3 - Implement both 1, (to allow deploment of all Templates and provide Navigation Template defaults), and 2, (to allow customization of templates on a per-decorator basis and a stable packaging option for those that require it). However, this might be just too complex to be worth it. Thoughts? Randy
