JSF / IPC / Portal 2.4

[jewhit]

Hello -

just wondering if anyone has any recommendations on what they think is the best method of communicating between portlets without a dependence on IPC, which is currently not finished in portal 2.4. I am building a large collection of JSF portlets, and inter-communication between the portlets is critical to functionality.

Any info / recommendations would be most appreciated!

thanks
Jim W.

[crni]

Or at least if somenoe could give us an estimate on the release date of IPC in portal 2.4.

[antoine_h]

Yes !!!!
interested too... for both when or details about the roadmap for this nice feature.
and some other way to do it (even if I would rather rely on IPC....)

jewhit : I've heard some portal uses the database to store the session information, and by the way make some portlet communication.
they did this way because there was no IPC at all.

building and using a jboss service seems a better way.

using the IPC seem the best way, may be with some carefull programming not to be tightly linked to it.
Just in case it may not be stable before a few next versions.

[jewhit]

I have been contemplating trying to build a "cheap mans" mechanism to handle interportlet communications via JMS or even jBoss messaging. in theory it might work, but i want to get my ducks in a row and throw the process / concept at Roy, et al. w/jboss as these guys know the guts of portal better than i.

there might be even more signalling capability, etc... if using ejb3, but i havent jumped into that yet... only so many hours in a man hour.

[jewhit]

oops... i mean only so many hours in a man day. :P

[roy.russo]

I can't give a firm date on IPC in 2.4, but it will be in the Final release.

I would stay away from creating more proprietary APIs for IPC, as there will soon be a standard introduced in JSR286.

[rameshkumar]

i am building jsf portlets.can anyone give me a sample jsf portlet

[peterj]

rasmeshkumar, you should have started a new post, not appended an unrelated question on an existing post.

Did you read the reference guide that comes with JBoss Portal? Chapter 5 has a tutorial that contains a simple JSF portlet.

[antoine_h]

Have a look a this work done by Michelle Osmond :
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mo197/portlets/thesis/ipc.php
and the implementation proposed :
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mo197/portlets/portlet_messaging/

There's a lot of details about IPC, various way of implementing it, etc...
Very interesting.

The implementation proposed is more about sharing parameters betwen portlets, but it may help.

Both sharing parameters, and IPC by events, seems to be in the next release of JSR-168.
see the early draft that was just proposed (see Julien Viet announcement here) :
http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=88030

A lot of what is in the early draft seems to be in preparation in 2.4 and the next releases.
But it will take some time to have it stable and compliant to the JSR-168 2.0 final. JSR-168 2.0 final has to be released first...

In the mean time, the implementation proposed by Michele Osmond in it's thesis seem to be a clean and stable way to do some sharing of parameter. If it is sufficient for your needs.

[antoine_h]

There is a small bug, du to a bug in preferences default management:
http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBPORTAL-911

JBPORTAL-911 is resolved in 2.4 RC3. (not RC2).

If you are using a previous version, Michelle Osmond is making a work around in the implementation, that will be on the next version.
another work around is not to let an empty preference for the NameSpace of the source of a message (and therefore in the corresponding message name in the receiver). Set a real NameSpace and it works fine.

There is also something going wrong on Jboss Portal, in the edit mode of the example portlet1/2.
Osmond is looking at it and will try to set a workaround also.

[jewhit]

How much of a variance is there between Michelle's work vs Proposed Standard vs JBoss's implementation?

It makes sense for obvious reasons to go down the path as Jboss as they are the platform of choice... but Michelle's implementation may suit at least temporarily if there is not a large amount of rework when JB's implementation is released.

[julien1]

Who is Osmond ?

[jewhit]

Julien -

I don not know Michelle Osmond personally, so i cannot speak of specifics. but from what i gather, Michelle prepared a Portlet v1 compliant IPC mechanism as a thesis project and has released it to the public. it is a "message box" based model... i have heard from others on and off of this board that it works well, but i have not personally used it.

[julien1]

yes, I remember I saw her posting on yahoo list. the document was excellent.

[germit]

hello,

so where i can read about IPC with JSF Portlets? i am searching for information, but can not find anything that covers JSF Portlets IPC. thanks to everyone with a helpful hint. i do not want to bother anyone with this post.

regards...