We came to the same conclusion - that is the logic of integrating Jetspeed portlets (and not all of Jetspeed) with Struts and Tiles. Once this is a reality the Jetspeed portlet api and our CMS - eContent and other applications (eFaq, eForum, ePoll, etc) will be easily integrated.
With Struts rapidly becoming the defacto MVC I do not understand the focus by Jetspeed on Turbine's MVC as an integrated part of Jetspeed. Perhaps someone can comment on that. Recognizing Struts increasing popularity we dropped out own MVC in Expresso and integrated Expresso with Struts over a year ago. Here's the design concept of Struts with Jetspeed's Portlet API as I understand it though this could be a little out of date now. Look forward to comments.... I believe the Struts team were working out portal-like applications using Tiles and the RSS Channel bean from the Commons-Digester, and have plans to personalization to this as well. From what I understand the Struts team is also very interested in integrating with the Jetspeed Portlet API, and believe that it can support a good deal of the specification from within Struts, perhaps all of it, and make the portlets available to any container. The portlets themselves are very similar to Actions, and like could use a Struts Action to dispatch the portlets, and then use Tiles to render the view. It may also be possible to have that Action recognize things like the portlet.xml, and merge that with the application's runtime configuration. Working along the lines of transforming the XML feeds into JavaBeans (via RSS implmentation in the Commons-Digester package), and then passing the beans to the view. The Tiles then just write the view from the bean, same as you would for a database query, or any other instance of dynamic content. The tricky part is setting up so that each Tile (fragment) can easily grab its own bean. This is where Struts may need to tap into what is provided by the API. With the Tiles/Struts integration you can define a page layout in a XML configuration file, and then refer to that defination in an ActionForward. The controller then renders the "page" directly by including the specified tiles. -- Sandra Cann http://www.jcorporate.com Open Standards based Java components "Our separation from each other is an optical illusion of consciousness." (Albert Einstein) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:jetspeed-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:jetspeed-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
