Current UI Framework

• The current framework consists of hierarchial markup regions consisting of Page/Region/Window/Portlet concepts

• Supports basic ajax

• Fully integrated with the core controller

New UI Server Design

• Biggest motivation is to decouple the functions of the Portal Core Controller and the UI Server

• The Core Controller needs to be a UI agnostic component that is responsible for extracting the Portlet output. But it should not concern itself with the client to which this will be

eventually rendered, layout, theme etc etc. The UI Server should handle those tasks

• There needs to be a well-designed protocol for communication between the Core Controller and the UI Server

• The Portal should be able to handle different clients like classic request/response, rich ui clients like ajax enabled ui, etc more flexibly.

• Between the Core Controller and the UI Server different aggregation methods such as full aggregation mode or partial aggregation mode should be handled

UI Server Model

• UI Server needs to add more UI entities to the existing concepts of Page/Region/Window/Portlet.

• One such possibility is the concept of a UI component(s) rendered inside of a Portlet like Ajax components etc and managing these interactions with the Portal

UI Server/Core Controller Protocol

Client Usecases to Prototype/Discuss