hey eric,
questions/comments inline -
Eric Dalquist wrote:
I'm suggesting that Pluto 1.1.0+ containers grok Pluto 1.0.x assembled
portlets.
I guess I feel like this isn't very good behavior to encourage. I'm not
sure why people are copying already deployed (assembled) portlets from
one container/portal to another. I really feel like we should be making
people work with Plain Old War Files (POWFs?) as much as possible and
assembled WARs should only exist in the servlet container.
I agree. But sometimes it is easier to drop the assembled portlet into
tomcat. If, for example, I have already published the channel
publishing document to uPortal, it is much easier to just drop the
assembled portlet into the webapps directory, without using the uP
deployer. This may not be the recommended way of doing things I'll
certainly grant you that...
Now this is much more my view towards the Pluto container, the driver
can do as it pleases. So if supporting the web.xml magic from other
versions of Pluto or other containers is very compelling I guess I'm
wondering if that support is an optional part of the container.
Ok so I'm not saying that uP has to support any web.xml magic. In the
case of a pre-assembled war I wouldn't use the uP deployer at all.
From my
uPortal 3 side of things I'd rather tell people to take their POWFs and
run the uPortal deployer task on them to set them up correctly and copy
them to the correct deployed location.
That way I don't have to worry
about supporting changes in some other containers web.xml magic
So, my earlier suggestion about 1.0 invoker support in the driver could
probably be re-written as, please make support for web.xml magic for
anything other than the current version of Pluto optional.
So how involved is uPortal in the assembly of web.xml files? Does it
not just delegate that to Pluto? Or do you assemble the portlets on
your own?
Elliot
-Eric
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
