Understanding architecture...

[ric1607]

Hello,

JBoss Portal looks terrific! I'm wondering however if it can fit in our existing webapp architecture.

After reading JSR-168 spec and JBoss Portal docs, something is still unclear to me: is it possible to include a portal page or a simple portlet as an iframe in an existing web-page (jsp-like) ?

I've read that PortletBridge allows the opposite (display a web-app in a portlet) and that a page layout in JBoss Portal can be a simple JSP, but this does not fit the need of extending an existing app.

So is it possible to keep our web-app as is and include portlets in some of the pages through iframes / JBoss portal ?

Thank you very much for any hint,

--Eric

[theute]

A portlet is not bound to a URL so iFrames is not a solution to your use case. You could eventually include the whole portal i guess but this sounds very odd to me.

Portals are all about aggregation and your use case seems to be about the opposite. (if you simply want to integrate portlets, then your webapp it basically a portal.

It is much more natural to modify your webapp to be 1 or several portlets, and integrate them in JBoss Portal. Hence the portletBridge project.

(That said JBoss portal is very modular and you could extract the portlet container to use it in your own 'portal')

[ric1607]

Thomas,

Thank you for your answer, especially on a week-end!
I hope I did not disturb your Saturday with my silly questions {:-)

One solution I was thinking of was indeed to include the whole portal page in an iframe. My use case being for instance to include a forum frame or a CMS frame within our existing app.

It sure looks odd (I confess), but it is according to my point of view a realistic use case: we have a complex existing webapp, with carefully crafted layout designed to use the top window with plenty of javascript everywhere -- and we cannot simply say "ok, let's put all that in a rectangle on the screen and add something beside".
So the solution would be to rewrite all the main layouts under portal templates and this is a too steep slope.

I'll try using the portal in an iframe and let you know about.

Thank you very much Thomas!

--Eric