Report on JSR-168 support in July 2005
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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:08:03 -0400
From: Craig Doremus <craig@maine.com>
Subject: Web Frameworks and Portlets: a Report from Java One
I am a Pluto committer, and recently returned from Java One. As you can
imagine, there were plenty of talks on Web Frameworks at Java One this
year including an enjoyable and educational session called Web
Frameworks Smackdown.
I was particularly interested in finding out what was the status of
portlet support for all the web frameworks. I feel that portlet
technology will not become popular until there are popular web
frameworks that support portlets. What follows is a summary of the most
common web frameworks supplemented with information I discovered
elsewhere.
- Java Server Faces: Stan Silvert, who works for JBoss and is a member
of the JSF expert group, gave a talk on JSP and portlets. I was told
later that the line to get in snaked around the building outside. Stan
contributed portlet support to MyFaces, a JSF implementation. According
to the talk, using JSF as a portlet is pretty straight forward when you
only have a portlet with View mode. However, some subclassing and other
modifications are required for the use of Edit or Help modes.
- Tapestry: Howard Lewis Ship, Tapestry's leader, talked to me for a
few minutes after the Web Framework Smackdown. He said he has produced a
module to support portlets for a client of his and that he has pretty
much complete full portlet support. In fact, there is a 'Portlet
Support' link to documentation off of the Tapestry home page. Ship
indicated that version 4.0 of Tapestry will include the portlet support
libraries.
- WebWork: Jason Carreira, a WebWork project leader, told me that there
are some people actively working on portlet support for WebWork and
said that their next version (2.2) should include this work.
- Spring: I talked with Rob Johnson in the hall between sessions about
portlet support and Spring. I told him that I saw the post that John
Lewis recently sent to the Pluto-user mailing list about
Spring-portlet support. I also said that I tried the Spring-enabled portlets out and
was happy that they worked out-of-the-box with Pluto. He was interested
in more detailed feedback on the implementation and said that he wants
Spring to support portlets soon.
- Shale: Shale, a Struts sub-project, is attempting to add value to
Java Server Faces like Struts did for the Servlet spec. It is in its early
stages and there has not been an official release yet. During the Q & A
following a special session on Shale, I asked Craig McLanahan about
portlet support. He told me that portlets were a feature they were
planning to support, but he did not elaborate
- Struts: There were no Struts sessions at Java One and it was not
represented at the Web Frameworks Smackdown. When someone asked about
Struts at the Smackdown, David Geary, a Struts committer, joked "Struts
is old school. Get over it!" He was representing Shale at the session.
I also know that Ate Douma, a Jetspeed committer, is working on a
Struts-bridge that will soon be part of the Bridges subproject of
Apache Portals.
I did not ask the obvious question of all these people: "When will
version N, with portlet support, be released"? because I know that it
is impossible to predict the schedule of an open source or JSR project.
All I can say is that if you want portlet support in your favorite web
framework soon, make it known to the leaders of the project, and,
better yet, considering helping to make it happen.