06winter-PDS

Portlet Development Strategies

Question:  How many staff are required to support a Portal with about 30,000 users and connecting to several backend systems (HR, Financials, etc).

Answer:  2 for each department you want to connect the sector
plus your own development team (1 person familar with the portal)
Need people to support application server, portal server, and the different portlets.  Also someone specializing in SSO server.
"GUI" developers 2-4 people, DBA, server admin for things like server load balancing.

Question: Has anyone here used those 3rd party JSF Wizards that create applications, they create AJAX and it can be used in portal?

Answer: No.  It's not industry standard, because AJAX is not part of the portlet spec.

Question: We're doing uPortal under WebSphere, portlets don't work then.  Somehow webshere deploys web apps differently.  Anyone have portlets on uportal working on websphere.

Answer: CalPoly might.  Check with Darren Kraker

Question: Whats the problems in Portlets with AJAX?

Answer: Spec doesn't address it.

Question: Anyone done WSRP?

Answer: We have done some exploratory work with Peoplesoft WSRP.  Multiple portlets on the same page, can lead to problems.  Be prepared to do lots of work configuring proxy portlet multiple times in your portlet.xml.  Not for the feint or heart.  Not a drag and drop kind of thing like it should be.  Remote portlets do not provide the promise.  uPortal 3, WSRP support is currently disabled.  It's a high priority item for a future uPortal 3 release, maybe uPortal 3 RC2.  Isn't necessarily the only answer.  Can call web services from a Portlet.

Question: Has anyone used a framework?

Answer:  We're using Spring Portlet MVC.  We're going to use JSF

Question: Does anyone know what ADF is?

Answer: <no answer> 

Question: Is <Spring Portlet MVC> similar to Spring Web MVC?  Can it be ported to a portlet?

Answer: It's not binary compatabile?  It's similar in feel class hierarchy, member names, etc.

Question: Can a servlet app be a portlet app?

Answer: In general no.

Question: Is it a typical case, to create a 'sophistacated' application in a portlet, that maximizes itself?

Answer:  UBC webmail is an example of this.  At least one other group has asked for this functionality.

Question: For interportlet communication, what are guidelines / best practices?

Answer: If you do a google "I'm feeling lucky" search for "portlet servlet", there's a portlet messaging library on the side tab of the resulting link.  Not spec compliant, but is an existing library to do.

Question: What are some good frameworks?

Answer: See vancouver presentation for additional details.  Struts, JSF, spring portlet mvc, tapestry. MVCPortlet

Question: If you're developing from scratch, is it smart to use Spring?

Answer: I'd recommend doing generic, Hello World work first.  If you start with Spring, you could get overwhelmed.

Question: Are there any open source portlets that are good examples?

Answer: Spring Portlet MVC wiki, attachments, uPortal 3 portlets, for example Bookmarks Portlet.

Statement: UP-1040 now has a proposed fix in JIRA, please download and test it out.