JBoss Portal for PDAs

[mkural]

Hello All,

Do any of you know of a theme for JBoss Portal that works well with PDA devices (Pocket PC, Palm, Blackberry, etc)? Currently when you access JBoss Portal from a PDA using any of the available themes (including the ones in the portlet swap) the portal comes out pretty ugly because all of the existing themes are developed for full-sized computers. PDA access is a crucial use case for a portal product. I am wondering if any one has been able to make JBoss Portal play nicely with PDA devices. What are your thoughts on how to achieve this?

Thank you,
Mete

[dhartford]

I, too, would be interested in this.

[mkural]

How do you think PDA support for JBoss Portal could be added? Do you think a new JBoss Portal theme that is designed to have a smaller frame and less graphics for PDAs would be enough? Or is there more needed to support PDAs in JBoss Portal?

[ivanlatysh]

I done a few simle projects for BlackBerry, and it is quite easy to do. But portlet must know that it rendering itself for BB. Since BB has limited HTML parser and no javascript.
I belive that the proper way is to detect client browser on a portal level and allow the special portlet to switch the theme. Because it is not always easy to detect mobile devices correctly.

[mkural]

Thanks for the info IvanLatysh. I have a few questions to you.
Could we have the person using the PDA such as BlackBerry access a different url with something like "/pda" at the end of it like myportal.com/portal/portal/default/myapplication/pda and assign a special stripped-down PDA-oriented theme for JBoss Portal to that /pda group of pages? If so, then is all we need a stripped-down PDA-oriented JBoss Portal theme assuming that the portlets emit content that is already PDA-friendly?

[ivanlatysh]

"mkural" wrote:
Could we have the person using the PDA such as BlackBerry access a different url with something like "/pda" at the end of it like myportal.com/portal/portal/default/myapplication/pda and assign a special stripped-down PDA-oriented theme for JBoss Portal to that /pda group of pages? If so, then is all we need a stripped-down PDA-oriented JBoss Portal theme assuming that the portlets emit content that is already PDA-friendly?

Yes, this how it is ussually done. Separate URL or separate domain for example www.mobile.myserver.com for www.myserver.com.
But in this case you have to maintain 2 different set's of pages.
As the matter of fact you can setup 2 diffrent portals one for PC another one for mobile devices.

[ivanlatysh]

Try this url: http://www.google.ca/pda

[mkural]

We can mantain two sets of pages, one for PC and one for PDA, it's no problem. But we need a theme that works for a Blackberry-like PDA. So you already created such a JBoss Portal theme for Blackberry yourself? Can you share with or sell to us that theme?

[ivanlatysh]

I didn't created JBoss portal theme for BB yet, currently I am workin on migrating JSP/Servlet applications for the portal. I am using WebModels with xslt transformation for the view.
But I can give you an advice, take div layout and modify it, remove divs and relace them with tables. It should work fine. Also remove all JavaScript.
And don't forget to strip out graphics, BB traffic is expensive :)