Craig Doremus wrote:
Jeremy,
I have not seen the Geromino console, so I am not sure what you mean by
"making it more dynamic", but a recent change to the Pluto portal might
help you. I have added a hot deployment feature to the Pluto Admin
application. There is a binary Snapshot of Pluto 1.0.1 with this feature
available at: http://cvs.apache.org/dist/portals/pluto/v1.0.1/.
The servlet controller that underlies the Pluto portal
(org.apache.pluto.portalImpl.Servlet) was modified to dynamically
re-read Pluto's registries
(portletentityregistry.xml,pageregistry.xml,portletcontexts.txt) when it
is invoked with a 'hot deploy' parameter.
The long term vision is that someone will be able to include a
management portlet with their application and when it starts that
portlet automatically appears in Geronimo's console allowing admins to
control the applications as well as the server.
There are a few challenges to overcome before we get there:
* letting the portlet container know the new portlet is available
I think the hot deploy stuff would help there. There may be an
additional challenge in that multiple portals may be running and
we need to make sure the portlet ends up in the right one.
* adjusting the aggregation to include the new portlet
I think we may need additional metadata with the portlet that would
determine where it should go. This is slightly different to a
traditional portal where the user determines where it goes - although
that should work too :-)
* controlling access to the portlet
Given these are for administration, we would need some form of access
control to determine who can see the portlet at all, what information
a user can view and what they can modify
I've been assuming that most of this type of functionality is portal
related rather than container related and that we would probably end up
including J2. However, I don't think we need all the functionality from
J2 and I have been concerned that we would end up bloating Geronimo just
to have snazzy console functions that people don't use.
With that in mind, I have been wondering if there is a use for a kind of
stripped down portal that does this kind of thing but does not offer the
capabilities of something like J2. Is that something that the Pluto
folks would be interested in or would it be more aligned with J2?
--
Jeremy
