JBoss Portal : Best Practices

[explorer]

Can any one help me out in understanding what are the best practices in developing a JBoss portal application.

1) Is it good to alter portal.sar's defualt-object.xml for making your portal default.
2) Is it good to deploy your web application in jboss-portal.sar.
3) Is it good to have your own portal.sar.
4) Is it good to have your portal.sar outside the jboss-portal.sar.
5) Is it good to have our own Header Portlet, instead of altering the header.jsp/tabs.jsp
6) Whats the best way to generate bread crumbs. Making it as a portlet?
7) If we have our-own sar going into jboss-portal.sar, how to hot deploy.


I have some EventListeners which need to be registered through jboss-service.xml and so i happened to put them in my own sar and put it under deploy of jboss server.

But i am facing some issues in there.

One unique issue is when i am trying to access Navigation.getPortalRuntimeContext(), some times it works fine and somtimes.. It throws me a NullPointerException.

Is it something to do with my sar being outside.

any ones explination on these issues is highly appreciated.

[syllant]

Nobody to answer to these relevant questions ?

Seems to me that best approch would consist in building another SAR for specific needs, but as far as I understand, you have to override some files inside core modules to get a portal really customized. Examples :

- META-INF/jboss-service.xml to customize header pages, error pages, ... (otherwise, override default files)
- portal-cms.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml to customize CMS
- portal-server.war/*.jsp for authentication
- etc.

I am setting up my first project with JBP. I've decided to override default files which needs changes (these files are externalized inside custom modules in SVN) and to create a SAR which stores all files specific to our portal : custom portlets, theme, layout, ...

But I'm not totally satisfied with this approch (and its implementation with Maven) : I wish I could customize a portal without changing default configuration.

How do you resolve this ?

Thanks.

[julien1]

1) yes, as long as you are aware of what you are doing
2) it does not change much, except that maybe for you it is easier to ship or backup
3) what does it mean ? the file is always yours
4) ????
5) no, you should customize the jsps
6) I think best idea would be to do something similar to the header / tabs which are using JSP and are injected in the theme (http://docs.jboss.com/jbportal/v2.6.2/referenceGuide/html/themeandlayouts.html)
7) you cannot, hot redeploying only happens at the deploy level, you cannot hot redeploy a nested deployable