Spring Portlet MVC and Richfaces Integration

[cnish_09]

Hi All,

          We have an application developed with frameworks like Spring Portlet MVC, JSF RI where  we have used the com.sun.faces.portlet.FacesPortlet as the portletClass for  org.springframework.web.portlet.mvc.PortletWrappingController to handle the portlet requests. We also have the managed beans in applicationContext.xml in session scope and refer it using the org.springframework.web.jsf.DelegatingVariableResolver through the <variable-resolver> tag in faces-config.xml. We use JBOSS Portal V2.7 as our portal server.

          Now we want JBoss Richfaces to bring in rich UI and we need to know is there is any steps we need to follow to integrate richfaces with spring MVC Portlet. If there is any please let me know the steps so that it will be really helpful.

I have worked in one of the project where we were able to successfully use the richfaces with Jboss portal server by using the JBOSS Portlet Bridge in which we use to have GenericFacesPortlet as the portlet class for all pages.

I have two primary doubts.

1. Is Jboss Portlet Bridge compulsary to use richfaces in jboss portal environment?
2. Is it possible to use Spring Portlet MVC and Richfaces together?

If you would have already come across this kind of architechure. I will be happy to hear some advice from you people.

Regards,

Nishanth.C

[alexsmirnov]

1. Jboss PortletBridge is JSR-301 implementation, that has additional features that let RichFaces and Jboss Seam to work in the portal environment. Because it uses standard specifications only, it should working properly in any JSR-286 compatible portals. Actually, it has been tested with Liferay, WebLogic, WebSphere while Jboss portal and GateIn its primary runtame environment.

2. I've never used RichFaces with Spring Portlet MVC. The  com.sun.faces.portlet.FacesPortlet is pretty outdated class, that has been replaced by JSR-301 speck far ago, so I doubt that it would work fine with RichFaces.

On the other hand, Jboss PortletBridge has modular structure that allows to register custom 'Strategy' object to integrate with particular library, so it would be possible to create custom strategy for Spring Portlet MVC. That is not a trivial task that requires Portlet, JSF, and Spring expierence . I'm familiar with formers, but does not good enough with Spring Portlet to integrate bridge with it.

If you want, I can help you to create such integration module. Unfortunately, I have no time to do it on my own, except if such task will come from Red Hat commercial support, so I would reorganize priorities in official way.

[funkybreizh]

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