JBoss Portlet getting Started

[joao.pereira]

Hi,

I'm interested in evaluating JBoss Portal, but I've no much time, and the learning curve must be minimized.
Any reference material to a newbie in Portlet technology. More Precisly on JBoss Portal from an developer perspective,
Thanks,
JP

[richardteeuwen]

Hi joao.pereira,

allready found something? I'm a newbie as well and interested in the same stuff so please let me know if you find something.

Thanks,

Richard

[joao.pereira]

Hi Richard,
I take the aproach of reading the documentation found in http://www.jboss.com/products/jbossportal/docs for JBoss Portal.
About JSR-168, the aproach is google. I didn't dig more than this...
BTW: whats your point of view about the real aplicability of this Technology?

Thansk,
JP

[bsmithjj]

With regards to getting started, my response here is similar to a posting I made here.

Why would you pick JBoss Portal Server? Here are my reasons

-I want to use Java as my programming language and JSP for developing UI's
-I am experienced with the JSR168 Portlet spec.
---I have used Jetspeed (1) which is not JSR168-based
---I have used Weblogic Portal which claims to support JSR168 (but it steers you towards its proprietary technology (like NetUI, etc...)
---I have dabbled with Jetspeed 2 back in the Summer 2005 when I was choosing a free, open-source JSR168 portal system - Jetspeed 2 is unfortunately a bit too convoluted at the moment (I shouldn't have to build Jetspeed 2 to use it)
-At the time (Summer 2005) I chose JBoss Portal Server, I was able to develop my portlets quickly and use the JSR168 spec. as my primary documentation.

The result of my choice is that I have portlets with no direct dependency on JBoss - they could be used in any JSR168 compliant portlet container. But along the way I found it relatively easy to build custom themes and pages.
So now I have a library of portlet code that makes it very easy for me to 'knock out' a JSR168/Java portlet very quickly. I have extracted the 'best' of my portlet library and submitted it to PortletSwap as a framework entry (JavaPlant Base MVC Portlet Framework).

Armed with a decent knowledge of JSR168, development experience using JSP, JSTL, etc.., JBoss Portal 2.0, and my tiny framework (sorry about the plug here ;-)) anyone can easily make a lot of progress developing JSR168/Java portlets. I think the other thing that has an effect on your 'ease of development' is your skill at setting up Java-web-app projects and using something like Maven or Ant to build, test, and deploy your portal app. If you comfortable with setting up a 'smooth' development environment, you should be able to code, compile, test, deploy, test quickly.

My comments about are only applicabe to the current release of JBoss Portal 2.0.X. I have some doubts that the Portal 2.2 release is going to come off 'smoothly' for those of us actively using Portal 2.0 that want to migrate to 2.2.

Hope this is helpful!

[joao.pereira]

Thanks Smith.
A very helpful hint to use JSR168 as documentation. Indeed, when I went down to the EJB technology, I also used the EJB 2.0 spec as base documentation and had no problems with jboss as. :) I'll use the portlet spec as a base documentation too.

Thanks,
JP

[julien1]

I agree that the spec is quite easy to read and is a good for a learning doc.