jbp 2.0 has lots of pitfalls
yxyang Jul 2, 2005 12:52 PMHi
After a week's struggling, i make my project based on jbp2.0 possible.
But my feedback is that jbp2.0 has lots of pitfalls.
(1)Due to Menu navigation is needed, when i try to create a menu portlet, the first difficulty is due to inter-portlet communication. When clicking on the menu item, it is not straitforward to display corresponding contents in the center window. Although i use session attribute which make it work.
(2)The default UserPortlet is not suitable becasue it hardcode a simple menu navigation with User management. Furthermore, it force the UserPortlet to be maximum to function. Definitely, it is hacking here.
(3)When you try to invalidate a session from your own portlet, it doesn't work. After two days' struggling, i decided to try use UserPortlet's userLogout(), it works although it does the same thing (session.invalidate()) as my menuPortlet.
(4)Due to lacking of inter-portlet communication, CMS becomes not so attractive. CMS content can only be displayed in CMS portlet window. But if you want to display different CMS content, the only way is click a URL WITHIN(embeded) in CMS portlet window. Don't forget that most of static pages (e.g. simple introduction page) has no RenderURLs and you only need to code them as JSPs.
All above issue is due to two reason:
Jbossportal lacks a workable menu navigation portlet. At least , hacking is not the best way.
Jbossportal shouldn't put portlets in the core. All portlets shoule be package seperately so that they are not coupled with the core. Currently, UserPortlet and CMS portlet are very special portlets so that they are very difficult to reuse.
I customize the UserPortlet by removing SHOWMENU and SHOWLOGIN and related codes becasue these codes shouldn't belong to UserPortlet. In addition, when registration success, no indication is displayed. If not reading the code, it is really confusion.
So, in my own project, i customized the UserPortlet, i don't use CMS system, I use my own theme, layout etc.
Hope any jboss team guys will read this and improve.
regards
Yang