Ralph Goers wrote:
The discussion we had some months ago. I have application logic that
needs to be exercised upon login. Currently I can do this through my
portal vendors extensions. I also have several portlets on a page that
need to use the same initialization. The only way to do this now is
extremely clumsy as each portlet has to do it and check that it hasn't
already been completed. A better mechanism would have been to provide
a way to invoke a method when a page is accessed.
As explained such page behavior is beyond the JSR 286 scope and would
need to be addressed in a future version and then define a more complete
page model.
We also have a requirement to have our theme process some portlets
differently than others. Ideally, a portlet (and pages for that
matter) should be able to have attributes associated with them in the
portlet.xml that the theme can interrogate.
The portlet can do this today: it can set things as init params in the
portlet.xml or as response properties at runtime.
We also have to share attributes between portlets and several
servlets. Our current vendor supports this including in servlet
filters in front of the portal. I haven't read the spec in a draft or
two, but I assume sharing is still limited to shared render
parameters. I have no idea why this limitation exists. I heard
something about it being not implementable in all containers, but that
doesn't make sense since the portal we are using runs in virtually
every container.
No, the spec does not limit the sharing of parameters to only portlets,
but on the other side, how would a portal implementation know that a URL
targeted to a servlet should contain the current shared render parameters?
In short, the spec allows me to build fairly simple portlets but is
completely deficient in when it comes to building applications made up
of groups of related portlets.
I completely disagree with that assessment. If you have a loosely
coupled portlet component model in your mind JSR 286 will provide you
with many things to create really complex applications based on
different portlets in different portlet apps.
If you expect that JSR 286 will provide you a model where you can create
larger, pre-packaged apps that consists of pages, portlets on the pages,
wires between these portlets, and themes for these pages, I agree that
JSR 286 will not help you here and you need vendor extensions for now.
On the other hand you get this JSR by end of this year instead of end of
2009....
Stefan
Ralph
Stefan Hepper wrote:
JSR 286 is in feature lock-down mode now. What use cases are you
referring too that cannot be done with JSR 286 involving several
portlets?
Stefan
