The Apache Pluto Community is proud to announce the release of Apache Pluto 1.0.1-rc-1: the first binary release of the reference implementation of the Java Portlet Specification.

Pluto 1.0.1-rc-1 is considered a release candidate. The promotion of this release candidate to general availability is expected within the few weeks, pending feedback from the community.

The Java Portlet Specification defines a Portlet API very similar to the Servlet API. The API provides a means for aggregating disparate content sources. The specification addresses security and personalization considerations and defines a standard with which these sources, or portlets can be deployed.

Pluto is an embedable portlet container which will typically be bundled within a fully functional Portal. The Pluto community has developed a simple portal driver implementation which allows for the testing and development of portlets with the container. The Pluto testsuite is an implementation agnostic portlet application which tests several basic operations of the container in which it is deployed.

The distribution is organized into four releases:

 1) A binary distribution bundled with Tomcat. This distribution is the easiest to install.
  
 2) A source distribution.
  
 3) A binary distribution containing the container library.
  
 4) A binary tools distribution with the portal driver and testsuite.

More information and a download link can be found at the Apache Pluto home page at http://portals.apache.org/pluto/

. . . I have put together a mavenless-deployment harness that uses Ant and have submitted it to the Pluto project. Download the portlet-deploy.zip file at http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/PLUTO-72 . Just unzip the file into your pluto-1.0.1-rc1 directory and set CATALINA_HOME to that directory. A portlet application war can then be deployed by running Ant within the portlet-deploy dir. After the script is run, you will still need to edit portletentityregistry.xml and pageregistry.xml as described in the FAQ (http://portals.apache.org/pluto/faq.html#portal). Although Pluto contains a bare-bones portal, I have found it to be a nice little environment for learning the Portlet API.

Congratulation for the new release !

Does the new release of Pluto support parallel execution of processAction or/and parallel execution of the Render request ?

If not,any plan in the future !

Thx ,

Rgds-Claude

No, Pluto doesn't support parallel rendering, and there are no plans to put it in.

However, I believe that Jetspeed 2 (which uses the Pluto portlet implementation) does do parallel rendering.

Yes Nick is right,

Pluto is a portlet container and it is not the responsability of the container to invoke several render() calls in parrallel.

It is the responsability of the portal that rely on the portlet container to launch several threads that call the render() method of the portlet through several calls (one per thread) to the Portlet Container SPI.

Also note that rendering portlets in parallel may not "always" be a good solution, it reallydepends on the portlet bahavior (if it does network calls, uses webservices...). Portals that provide such a mechanism should allow a per portlet parametrization...

Benjamin Mestrallet
http://www.exoplatform.com

One more problem is if you use ThreadLocal framework (As I know JSF RI use ThreadLocal to store the current FacesContext instance) in your portlet, your portlet will be broken as you have different thread in the process action and render. It requires you to design all of your portlets to work with mutithreading environment. In this case you will have less choices from the third party portlet vendor.

Benjamin,

My question was more about the Pluto Portal Driver which is bundled with the portlet container.
The JSR168 spec does mention briefly the possible support of parallel invocation of the rendering request. I was curious if it was tested against the reference.

However, Nick gave me my answer and a pointer with JETSPEED 2.
 
Merci, for your answer. ;-)

Rgds-Claude

... to the Pluto team on a job well-done. Also thank you for helping us spot and debug a couple of subtle bugs in Tomcat over the past year or so ;)

It would be useful to have http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4690 fixed (or else get a better explaination of why it is not a bug).

does pluto support portlets in JSF?