Ajax in Enterprise PortalsWesley Hales

http://wesleyhales.com

Wesley Hales is:

• JBoss Portal Lead UI Guy

• Author of InfoQ article series:Developing Portlets using JSF, Ajax, and Seam

• JBoss Portlet Bridge project lead

• JSR-301 Expert Group member

Introductions

• Your experience with portals?

• What do you want to gain from this session?

Portals & PortletsWhat is a Portal?

• Windows that provideaccess to web applications and other information.

• Works across organizational boundaries to aggregate content coming from various web technologies: JSF, Seam, OpenSocial, Wicket, PHP, Struts...

Portals & PortletsPortlets

• Are managed by a portal/portlet container.

• Portlet windows are aggregated via a portalpage.

• A Portlet Application is also a Web Application. The Portlet Application may contain servlets and JSPs in addition to portlets. Portlets, servlets and JSPs may share information through their session.

Portlet Ajax vs. Regular (Servlet) Ajax

Pitfalls with 1.0 portlets• portlet URL’s point to the portal, not to the portlet

• You cannot make asynchronous calls to portlets through portlet URLs

• This results in the replaced markup being all the portal page markup not just the portlet window fragment.

How we handle it• Because a portlet is a Web application that can contain other

resources, such as servlets and JSP pages, you can make the asynchronous requests to the resources that are bundled with the portlet.

Standard Portlet 1.0 Ajax

Ajax gets better with Portlet 2.0

serveResource and resourceUrls

• With the newer (JSR-286) spec, we now have the serveResource() mechanism that makes Ajax easier.

• Makes it easy to migrate existing JSR 168 applications

• Works with existing client-side libraries

• Partial updates to the portlet’s UI

Portlet 2.0 Ajax

View Portlet 2.0 Ajax Demo on YouTube

JSR-286 Ajax Demo

Today's Ajax Component Libraries

• What libraries are available to portlet developers?

• Do I have to use JSF?

• It is only framework (currently) with a spec backing it for portlets.

• Two of the more popular libraries for JSF are:

• IceFaces

• Uses custom built bridge

• RichFaces

• Works with a JSR-301 based bridge

What is a Bridge, and why do we need one?

• There are different bridges to handle many different web applications.

• Wicket

• Seam

• Spring MVC

• JSF

• Struts

• PHP

• A bridge is often just a portlet written to handle the web application processing and lifecycle.

Portlet

Other component libraries, like IceFaces, provide their own "bridge" or way to handle the portlet and JSF lifecycles.

IceFaces Portlet Demo

View IceFaces Component Demo on YouTube

IceFaces Portlet Markup

RichFaces PortletThe RichFaces component library runs under the JBoss Portlet Bridge, an implementation of the JSR-301 specification to support JSF within a portlet.

RichFaces Portlet Demo

View RichFaces Component Demo on YouTube

RichFaces Portlet Markup

Portlet Bridge Summary

• Standards make life easier when investing in a portlet/Ajax/Component solution

• Currently the JBoss Portlet Bridge supports any combination of JSF, Seam, and RichFaces to run inside a portlet.

• It is currently in Beta 4 and should be approaching GA sometime in early '09 wen the spec is finalized.

• JSR 301 scheduled to be complete early ’09 (168)

Today’s Challenges

The Portal is “the glue” that holds all of the portlet windows together.

What if each portlet uses it’s own library?• YUI, jQuery, Prototype and yajf...

• Conflicts and collisions

Solutions?• Namespaced libraries

• Today, JBoss Portal limits its usage of Javascript libraries for that specific reason

• ideas?

Mashups and OpenSocial Portlets

• Who is doing it?

• Are there any portlets available that make this easy?

QuickStart Portlet Demo

View Quickstart Demo on YouTube

Questions?

• IceFaces Portlet Setup Infohttp://tinyurl.com/3l2fuz

• JBoss Portlet Bridgehttp://www.jboss.org/portletbridge/

• email: whales@redhat.com