Best way to learn

[rbreault]

Whats the best way to learn how to write jboss portal apps/portlets? And are there any good books that would take a total beginner from scratch.


Thanks,

[claprun]

Look at the doc: http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossportal/docs/index.html
Look at the wiki: http://jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossPortal
Read the spec: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168
Ask for JBoss training! ;-)

[peterj]

The Manning sandbox contains a draft manuscript on portals and portlets by Hepper etal (http://www.manning.com/hepper/). You must register to enter the sandbox but registration is free. It helped me, and the price was right.

[yxyang]

the best way to learn is to do real projects based on jbossportal.

Anyway, jbpm is a good stuff and worth to using it also.(combine it with jbp).

It will work but need your hard working and learning.

Yang

[julien1]

Yes the book draft is very good and priceless :-)

[agathon]

The above are some fine suggestions, but realistically I would advise you to learn Struts, install the Struts Bridge, and go from there. Coding raw portlets is, to put it mildly, unproductive (unless you really know what you're doing, and you're implementing functionality that just can't be done any other way).

[agathon]

Oh yeah, one more thing... Stay as far away from JSF as possible. I recently had to scrap half a project because of serious flaws in both the implementation (MyFaces) and the specification. There are some really good ideas in the specification (i.e. IoC), but also some really really bad ones (i.e. total lack of control over markup) . Its fine for writing toys, and simple forms, but in my opinion, its just not ready for real application development.

[theute]

Tell us about the flaws

[jewhit]

yes, i would like to hear what you have identified as flaws within JSF. I have started a huge project, based on JSF on top of JB Portal. i am far from being a JSF expert, but i am slowly but surely getting there. If there is any info you may have on the "ins" and "outs" in general, it would help a great deal.

[bwessel]

Yes the book draft is very good and priceless :-)

Where is the book draft?

I'm glad you asked this question because I too am having a hard time with just the documentation, wiki (I don't see anything on this page that helps - am I missing something??) and the specification. A detailed walkthrough of creating a portlet and deploying would be awesome! Does a walkthrough exist?

[julien1]

what about the tutorial we provide ? http://docs.jboss.com/jbportal/v2.4/reference-guide/en/html/tutorials.html

otherwise you go on http://manning.com/hepper/ you register and login and you can get a free copy of the book.

[peterj]

Regarding "the book draft", Julien was replying to my previous reply in this post: http://www.manning.com/hepper/

[bwessel]

The tutorial (http://docs.jboss.com/jbportal/v2.4/reference-guide/en/html/tutorials.html) is exactly what I need! I was looking at the Portal 2.2 docs since that is the version I am using and it doesn't have this nice tutorial in it. Thanks Julien!

I also got the Manning book and it looks good too. This project is looking much easier now than it did this morning. Thank you!!

[agathon]

Tell us about the flaws

What finally ended up killing the project, was that input components would "disappear" (fail to render) when nested in a datatable component, upon every other page view. This problem generated no exceptions and nothing pertaining to the problem was recorded in the log. Since we were pressed for time, we were forced to evaluate other options; eventually settling on Struts, which has been working quite well.

In my opinion, the single largest flaw in the framework is the lack of control the developer has over the markup that is generated. I found the <f:verbatim> tag to be almost completely worthless in this regard, since you can't nest other components inside the tag. Additionally, if you are using the latest version of JSP, you can't include partial XHTML statements inside verbatim tags, since everything has to be valid XML. This made formatting the user-interface inordinately difficult and time-consuming.

As I said above, things aren't all bad. I really liked the IoC backing bean management features. This really has the potential to make your code almost entirely independent of the framework. Navigation and validation were also well conceived.

[theute]

What you mention first looks like a weird bug in your application, not a flaw.

"lack of control the developer has over the markup" is actually the best thing, as a developer i don't want to mess with markup, i want my designer to do this job. This is just a matter of components anyway and the components let the designer focus once on the way something has to be rendered.

I wouldn't prevent users from gaining benefits of JSF for those reasons. JSF is by design more adapted to a portlet environment since it doesn't rely on the HTTP*Servlet*Request.