JSR-286, the Portlet Specification 2.0, is now under review at the JCP. This version of the Portlet specification "plans to align with J2EE 1.4, integrate other new JSRs relevant for the portlet, and align with the WSRP specification V 2.0."

Current specification members are Vignette, Sun, BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP; the expert group membership is still open.

According to the proposal, the following areas are to be addressed:

• Corrections and clarifications
• Add access to Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) data via the JSR188 API
• Introduction of portlet filters
• Inter-portlet communication as defined in WSRP 2.0
• Public render parameters as defined in WSRP 2.0
• J2EE 1.4 support
• Enhance caching support and align caching with WSRP
• Enhance the portlet tag library
• Align with WSRP versions 2.0
• Coordinate with the JSF EG to better align JSF with portlets

No mention is made of the umbrella Java EE 5.0 specification, which may or may not be a bad thing. The final draft is scheduled to be finished by the end of 2006.

That is a good notice for all of us that are using Java portals for deploy ours applications.

By the way,
What do you think about using a Java Portal to provide security and module navigation for a business application?

What limitations have your found in JSR-168?
What avantage in using JSR-168 for business applications?

Cheers
Xavaier Paniza

Does anybody know/have more about this particular point: "Inter-portlet communication as defined in WSRP 2.0" - how would this look? Would this be similar to WebSphere Portal's features for Inter-portlet communication?

I might just be tired this morning but I couldn't find the actual 2.0 draft right as it stands right now. Google found some mailing list entries with comments but that's about it.

It will be nice to get some of the features that the spec JSR is promising for portlets, though.

-Mike

I might just be tired this morning but I couldn't find the actual 2.0 draft right as it stands right now.

That's because there is no such draft yet ... the headline on this article slightly mis-states what is going on. At this point, a JSR proposal for Portlet 2.0 has been submitted to the JCP. The next steps of the process are to have the JCP Executive Committee vote to accept it, and for the expert group to finish getting formed. After that, the work on the actual spec can get started in earnest.

Craig McClanahan

I found this draft at the oasis site:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14948/wsrp-specification-2.0-draft-12.doc

I might just be tired this morning but I couldn't find the actual 2.0 draft right as it stands right now.

That's because there is no such draft yet ... the headline on this article slightly mis-states what is going on. At this point, a JSR proposal for Portlet 2.0 has been submitted to the JCP. The next steps of the process are to have the JCP Executive Committee vote to accept it, and for the expert group to finish getting formed. After that, the work on the actual spec can get started in earnest.Craig McClanahan

The expert group is full of fat vendors. If they don't get some guy that really gets portals/portlets e.g. Rickard Oberg, and maybe some guy in the portal development team from JBOSS to that expert group, all this thing will be as useless as the previous portlet spec.

The first version of the JSR 168 spec wasn't that bad. If you look at any standard, it usually takes a few rounds to really mature (compare EJB 1, 2, and 3).

--
Brian Chan
Chief Executive Officer
Liferay, LLC
Enterprise. Open Source. For Life.

Hi Brian,

congrats to you Brian, LPortal is now very cool, IMO the best Open Source portal/portlets out there!

Cheers,
Lofi.

Thanks Lofi, we do try :) We're constantly grateful for the contributions made by our large portal community. It's amazing to see the innovation and contributions pour in.

Thanks Lofi, we do try :) We're constantly grateful for the contributions made by our large portal community. It's amazing to see the innovation and contributions pour in.

I don't want to flamebite here but the support may *really* be improved. I'm sorry to say but in the company I was working in we've almost got to be sorry that we chose Liferay as our portal implementation because I wasn't able to get *any* help about the status and how to work with WSRP in Liferay. And that was after I eventually found (and told you guys) in the core Liferay product some cases of "double checked locking" problem which I suspect all of your customers benefit from now, if it was fixed.

What was even worst was that there isn't out there another OS portal product that we could choose to fullfill the project needs.

I'm sorry to say, portlet for me is a bitter experience and part of it was because of Liferay's lacking support. I don't blame anybody though, I believe you guys give your best and also I believe Liferay is maybe the best OS choice out there.

Hi Dorel,

I'm sorry about your experience with WSRP related bugs in Liferay. We really do our best to answer questions that are posted on the forums, but we do just get so many of them these days that we don't have the bandwidth to answer every single one and give quality service to corporations that have paid for commercial support. We always give priority to commercial support because that is what funds a viable business.

Please contact us at sales at liferay dot com if your company is interested in guaranteed commercial support.

Also, on another note, Jetspeed, eXo, and JBoss Portal I believe also have WSRP and JSR-168 support, but I believe you'll find that if you want commercial support, they'll either not have the support structure to provide it, or if they do, will also charge for it.

Thanks for your understanding.

I agree. For a first version it was actually quite good.

I might just be tired this morning but I couldn't find the actual 2.0 draft right as it stands right now.

That's because there is no such draft yet ... the headline on this article slightly mis-states what is going on. At this point, a JSR proposal for Portlet 2.0 has been submitted to the JCP. The next steps of the process are to have the JCP Executive Committee vote to accept it, and for the expert group to finish getting formed. After that, the work on the actual spec can get started in earnest.Craig McClanahan

I should have clarified. I was looking for the WSRP 2.0 spec. The article had referred to WSRP 2.0 compatibility and so I wanted to see what that spec had done so far. Someone else pointed out down below where a draft 2.0 spec could be found on Oasis, though.

-Mike

The wsrp tc is working on wsrp 2.0. Though even I havent looked at the working draft it seems that the new specification will specify a 3 phase request / response process. One of these phases will be reserved for processing portlet events.

You are correct there is very little documentation and most of it are skeleton documents on wsrp 2.0. It is barely enough to get some clue on what is being cooked. I would like if someone from the TC gives us some inside dope on whats cooking.


I dont know about the websphere way of doing things but I guess it will be very similar to the way weblogic handles IPC over WSRP.

For details check out
http://edocs.beasys.com/wlp/docs81/wsrp/index.html
http://forums.bea.com/bea/thread.jspa?forumID=2044&threadID=600007178&messageID=600014820#600014820

Cheers
anand raman

Hi all,

I believe this is a very good news for all that are trying or using portal/portlet. MyVietnam is porting its mvnForum product to portlet and has tested and made sure it run well on IBM Websphere Portal, Liferay, Exo, uPortal, Jetspeed2, StringBeans, pluto. We are in the process of testing and integrating with Oracle Portal and WebLogic Portal before we make a public annoucement of the General Available 1.0 version.

More over, MyVietnam also provides mvnCMS portlet, which is a both content management system and online news publishing system. This mvnCMS portlet also run well on IBM Websphere, Liferay, Exo, uPortal, Jetspeed2, StringBeans, pluto.

With mvnCMS, you can build news publishing sites such as http://www.bbc.com or http://www.cnn.com quite easily.

mvnForum and mvnCMS are tightly integrated into MVN Collaboration Suite and available in 2 edition: standalone edition and portlet edition.

I think besides the inter-portlet communication, the other very important is a public API to deal with user database and permission database of the portal. This is because portlet does not manage this so portal should provide a public API to access it. Currently we have to use vendor's API but it will not compatible with other portals.

Other things is portlet should be provided IP and UserAgent whenever possible, because the portlet usually need IP and User Agent information to decide what should be processed.

When the specs Portlet 2.0 released, mvnForum and mvnCMS will be updated shortly and we will provide version for Portlet 2.0

For more information and demo, please visit:

mvnForum portlet: http://www.myvietnam.net/pluto/portal/mvnforum-portlet
mvnForum standalone: http://www.mvnforum.com

mvnCMS portlet : http://www.myvietnam.net/pluto/portal/tincntt
mvnCMS standalone: http://www.tincntt.com/tincntt/cms/

You could contact us for more detailed information at this link http://www.myvietnam.net/myvietnam/myvietnam/contact

Best regards,

Minh Nguyen

mvnForum/mvnCMS developer

http://www.MyVietnam.net

Hi Minh,

hope you still remember me ;-)

Nice stuff to see mvnForum is becoming portlet now, so it can be used everywhere... A question, how tough was it to move from a normal servlet app to a portlet? Did you need to rework a lot of things?

Warm regards,
Lofi - OpenUSS.

Hi Minh,hope you still remember me ;-)

Hi Lofi, it was my pleasure to meet you in Vietnam, and it is nice to see you here in this thread :-). Is everything okie?

Nice stuff to see mvnForum is becoming portlet now, so it can be used everywhere... A question, how tough was it to move from a normal servlet app to a portlet? Did you need to rework a lot of things?

Since mvnForum is based on the MVC pattern so it is not quite hard to port mvnForum to portlet, MyVietnam also have framework to make the development of portlet far more easy. The convertion from servlet to portlet involve many things, including:

- need good understanding of portlet
- refactor the servlet app to use render and processAction, currently we use MVN Framework to solve these issue.
- The session problem because portal context and servlet context has different session, If use Tomcat 5.5.x then we just need config, but if use older servlet container, we must install a servlet to portal to deal with the session issue.
- the stylesheet also need to be changed to compatible with portlet specs.
- Download issue because portlet cannot generate binary content.
- Integrate the user database with portal's user database. This is based on vendor's API so I think portlet specs should support API to work with user database of the portal.
- Some jstl tag only support serlvet, and must be changed to support portlet, such as pager tag

I would be very happy if other developers here share the experience converting from serlvet app to portlet app.

Regards,

Minh Nguyen

http://www.MyVietnam.net

As for user databases, in my opinion and experience this should always be done through LDAP, i.e. use the existing LDAP API's to do it. However, there *should* be a standard way to access the LDAP connection for a portal in a portlet.

As for permissions, I suppose this should be somehow aligned with other specs in this space, such as XACML. Does anyone have experience with working with such standards and API's? In general I think there is a wide range of complexity of permissions databases (I know we have a fairly complex one compared to many others, and yet I'm sure there are others who are even more complex), so it might be difficult to get a unified one to work.

Design-wise it looks more a port of a web application rather a portlet application. I think a redesign is requied to MVN Forum to make it better fit in portals. It is a common problem with portlet application design.

-- Punit Pandey
http://portlets.blogspot.com

Did you see any portlets anywhere? nobody is using them! Splitting web page into chunks is not a good sight

With extensive experience in writing JSR 168 portlets, we are planning to submit our suggestions to JCP. I would like to invite everybody to join our discussion on JSR 286, the Portlet 2.0 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlets and post their suggestions. What do you want to see in Portlet 2.0?