Architecture advice

[simplex-software]

Greetings,
One of our company's client developed by its internal staff a JBoss Portal based application. The interesting detail is that each portlet is a separate web-app, deployed in a separate war. And as there are almost 100 portlets, there are 100 web-apps. The Eclipse workspace is very heavy as it contains more than 100 projects (web-apps, ejbs, etc.). We were very surprized by this architecture and wanted to know what exactly has determines the designers to adopt it. Did anyone already see such an architecture or are there any advices ?

Many thanks in advance.

Nicolas

[peterj]

I could see using this architecture if each portlet is an application unto itself and did need to interact with any other portlets or any common data.

Example: the sample news and weather portlets are in separate war files because they are totally separate applications.

Also, using this type of architecture, it is fairly easy to build a custom portal containing only the desired portlets.

Of course, if there are multiple portlets that provide access to common data, those portlets should all be bundled into a single war file. An example might be a set of portlets that are used by employees to log their work time, view reports on time spent, and so on.

[simplex-software]

Yes, all the portlets are higly inter-corelated, they need to communicate and share data. And they communicate using HTTP POST requests instead of IPC ! That's probably because IPC doesn't work with separated deployed portlet ?