Introduction (The Idea)

Currently the base uPortal project has a module called uportal-portlets-overlay. This contains a list of portlets that come with uPortal right out of the box. As of late it seems that a lot of portlets want to be bundled, as this is the way you become a mainstream portlet.  This is great, however there are some downsides. It makes development build times longer when you do a deploy-ear as it has to download/build each sub project.  For some places this also means you are deploying a lot of portlets that you will never utilize.

So we had an idea, and thought we should get it down on paper.  What if we had a uPortal core project that just contained the bare minimum to get uPortal up and running. No bundled portlets. Then in a separate project we pulled in uPortal and overlayed the ear with all the portlets that we wanted to bundle.  This would be neat because we could have multiple types of bundles. In the future we could even have a "build your own bundle" feature (example of that kind of service: http://getbootstrap.com/customize/).

Diagram of Future Build Workflow

(work in progress)