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Portlet Development FAQ

• Clustering JSR-168 Portlet Applications in Tomcat — JSR-168 Portlet applications represent a special challenge when it comes to clustering within Tomcat (or any other servlet container, for that matter). In order to effectively cluster web applications, session data must be replicated or shared between the nodes in the cluster. Otherwise, the user experiences a complete loss of context during a node failover. While Tomcat has provided session replication for quite some time, it has not supported replication of session changes resulting from a cro
• Integrating Alfresco with uPortal — Alfresco offers a portlet version of their web application.  This can be
• Sharing uPortal's Connection Pool with Portlets on Tomat 5.5 — Portlets, being their own application on Tomcat, do not inherently have access to uPortal's connection to the database.  Fortunately, however, you can move uPortal's database connection context to a global context which is visible to your portlets.  Many thanks to Chris Holdorph form UNICON for his insight, and Gregg Lagnese, MicroDeveloper, Inc. for his online Oracle JNDI reference http://www.microdeveloper.com/html/JNDI_Orcl_Tomcatp3.html.  As a note, these modifications were made on uPortal 2
• JBoss Forums Portlet — The JBoss Forums Portlet http://labs.jboss.com/portal/index.html?ctrl:id=page.default.downloads&project=portletswap&category=.portlets.collaborate can only be deployed in the JBoss Portal. There are several calls to JBoss portal specific services, which do not exist in uPortal.

Portlet Development Technologies and Frameworks

• Struts Bridge — This document will explore how a Struts http://struts.apache.org/ application can be modified to work as a JSR168 compliant portlet. It will hopefully serve as a useful reference guide for those planning to install the Struts Bridge http://portals.apache.org/bridges/multiproject/portals-bridges-struts/index.html into their existing Struts applications. As an example we'll use the iBATIS http://ibatis.apache.org/ version of Petstore application, the Petstore is a commonly implemented demonstratio
  • LocalHsqldbConfigurator
• portlet defineObjects tag extension — The portlet tag library includes a tag called <portlet:defineObjects/>. This tag establishes three objects; renderRequest, renderResponse and portletConfig for use in included portlet JSP pages. Although you can certainly access some useful information through these objects using the JSTL tag library, accessing scoped variables and the like will require the use of scriptlets. JSTL users are used to having access to scoped variables via the JSTL implicit objects (requestScope, sessionScope, ap

Portlet Development

Information about the Portlet APIs and Jasig's best practices for portlet development.

• Example Portlets
• Portlet Request Lifecycle
• Accessing Portal Roles and User Attributes — Accessing uPortal groups and user attributes from the portlet environment.
• Portlet Preferences
• Logging Best Practices
• CSS Best Practices — CSS usage in portlets requires care by the portlet developers to avoid styling conflicts with both the portal framework and other portlets on the same page.
• Automatically Reload a Portlet
• Setting a New Item Count
• Portlet Modes — Using and switching between JSR-168 portlet modes
• JSP Best Practices
• AJAX in a JSR-168 Portlet — Recommended solutions for using AJAX in a portlet
• Minimized WindowState Handling
• Accessibility and Portlet Development
• Portlets using Proxy CAS
  • CASifying Apache Pluto portal driver
• JavaScript Best Practices — JavaScript usage in portlets requires care by the portlet developers to avoid library, version and namespace conflicts with both the portal framework and other portlets on the same page.
• Security Information for Portlet Developers
• Contributing Portlets to Jasig
• Portlet Internationalisation
• Techniques for integrating AJAX within Spring Web Flow Portlets

Sharing Portlets

Portlets from other Portals

Portlet Solutions Flowchart

Troubleshooting Portlet Deployment