Hi Eric,
Thanks for the feedback - let me just real quick respond here; more
fully formed thoughts to follow -
Eric Dalquist wrote:
I'd like to get my 2 cents in on this.
As much as part of me sees where supporting old pluto 1.0 WARs is a plus
or other random WARs as well.
A larger part of me says the spec says nothing about web.xml magic, that
is container specific and no one should be dealing with a container
specific WAR outside of the webapps (or equivalent) directory of their
container.
I don't think I'm suggesting that we expose any web.xml magic, in fact
I'm trying to encapsulate the 1.0 and 1.1+ magic.
I feel fairly strongly that the deployment process of a
portlet WAR is a portal specific action and something that the Pluto
container should not be concerned with.
So right now the format of a Pluto 1.0 assembled web.xml is tied to a
Pluto 1.0.x container implementation, and similarly Pluto 1.1.0+
assembled wars are tied to the Pluto 1.1.0+ container implementation.
Specifically in 1.1.0+ the PortletEntityImpl and the PortletServlet have
ties in one way or the other to the format of the assembled web.xml.
I'm suggesting that Pluto 1.1.0+ containers grok Pluto 1.0.x assembled
portlets.
What I hear Chuck saying is make the "grokking" extensible/pluggable.
I see making a more pluggable
strategy for the invoker but I would vote for putting the pluto 1.0
invoker support classes in the pluto driver and not the container.
Since portlet registration and invocation is a container-specific
process, I'm not sure how that would work. I mean, the classes could go
into the driver, but then the container would depend on the driver which
I think would be not good.
Does that help alleviate your concern, or am I just mis-understanding -
which is _entirely_ possible :-)
-Eric
Charles Severance wrote:
Elliott,
I have a similarly non-direct answer :). As a fan of war file binary
compatibility - even if de-facto, I am interested in having Pluto 1.1
capable of supporting as many binary war formats as possible - not
*in* the Pluto code - but with extension capabilities in PortletServlet.
Here is my use case... I lets say that a long time ago, I wrote a
JSR-168 container called XYZPortal perhaps from scratch, and made my
own convention for web.xml hacking. So I have my XYZPortletServlet
and some stuff in my web.xml about portlet classes and servlet URLs.
But I want to drop these wars into a Pluto 1.1.x container with no
modifications to the war. This is what I want to do.
Write a *different* implementation of XYZPortletServlet (perhaps even
one that extends Pluto's Portlet Servlet) - put this implementaiton up
in shared - In this servlet - I look at all my init parms, paths, etc
and *call* stuff in Pluto's PortletServlet so that these portlets are
properly registered with Pluto's portlet servlet.
My guess is that to write such a "XYXPortletServlet extends
PlutoPortletServlet" would really be quite simple - things like the
paths to servlets might even not matter at all - because the goal is
to register the portlets *into* Pluto 1.1.x - not into XYZContainer.
So while I have no answer for your basic question - as you cruise
through the code - think about the notion of extending PortletServlet :)
/Chuck
On Mar 11, 2007, at 11:19 AM, David H. DeWolf wrote:
Elliot,
I have a couple of thoughts, but perhaps not a direct answer:
1) Binding the creation of this to the invoker service makes absolute
sense. In fact, since each invoker implementation will probably
utilizes it's own mechanism and may not requires it, I don't even
think it needs to be exposed within it's interface - just bound to
the impl.
2) While you're at it, you may want to consider the effects of
eventually only requiring ONE servlet to be mapped per PORTLET APP
instead of per PORTLET. This is the reason I changed the approach in
the first place. Having everything map to
/PortletInvoker/PortletName allows us to use a wildcard servlet
mapping of /PortletInvoker/* eventually (or a filter for that matter,
which I think we may need anyways eventually to support portlet filters.
3) Having a service encapsulate this logic is fine.
PortletInvokerUriResolver seems like a good idea to me.
4) In terms of backwards compatibility, in 1.1.x we should be
binarily compatible for sure. The one areas where I think we can get
away with not being compatible is if we want to extend the
OptionalContainerServices interface. We specifically put a note in
the javadocs that impls should be prepared to support additional
optional services and instead of implementing the interface directly,
they should consider extending the default impl to ensure future
versions do not break binary compatibility.
For 1.2.x I think we may deprecate several things and we have the
option of breaking binary compatibility to some extent. Whatever we
do, we need a very clear and straight forward migration plan.
Does that help and answer your questions, at least somewhat?
David
Elliot Metsger wrote:
I'm working on support for Pluto 1.0.x portlets in Pluto 1.1.x and
1.2.x (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PLUTO-325). Basically,
I want a 1.0.x assembled war file to "just work" with Pluto 1.1.x
and above. I don't want people to have to recompile or munge their
1.0.x web.xml or war files.
As I see it, this involves:
1) mapping the portlet-guid from Pluto 1.0.x web.xml to the portlet
name 2) supporting the Pluto 1.0.x invoker URI.
I have code to commit for this right now (and it works!!! bonus,
right?) but I'm questioning the design for item 2.
Currently the URL used by the DefaultPortletInvokerService is
obtained from the PortletEntity. The PE has the invoker URI
hard-coded. Since I need to support both the 1.0.x and 1.1.0+
invoker URI formats, we need a more pluggable solution. My thinking
is to look up the servlet mapping for the portlet from the WebAppDD,
and get the invoker uri from the servlet mapping.
My question is, where do we plug the functionality in - before I go
committing like a crazy man :)
What I did was have the PortletEntity use a new package-private
PortletInvokerUriResolver class. The advantage of this is that the
PortletEntity interface doesn't change, which is important for
maintaining binary compatibility on the 1.1.x branch.
But I'm wondering if a better, or ultimate, solution is to make
invoker uri resolution the responsibility of the
PortletInvokerService. Makes sense right? If that is the case then
do people agree that one solution is appropriate for 1.1.x and a
second solution is more appropriate for 1.2.x?
Could we - for the 1.2.x solution - remove the getControllerUri()
method from the PortletEntity interface (what is the policy on
binary compat between 1.1.x and 1.2.x, considering our Java 5
requirement for 1.2.x), and move portlet invoker uri resolution into
the PortletInvokerService?
Thanks for your thoughts,
Elliot
