Suggestion sought on JSF page layout design

Hi All,

As part of my project requirement i need to display multiple small windows (similar to portlets) in one jsp page. I am using JSF(Sun RI, Richfaces) tags in my jsp page.

Now one way to do this to go for portlet. What if i want to implement it in jsp page to display multiple windows .

Any help on how to do this will be very helpful.

The technical term for "small windows in a page" is panes. A window is a free-floating GUI object; window panes are fixed within windows.

If you need independent behaviours, you need a portal. That's what portals are all about. However, if you just need to slice up a display area, you have a number of options.

For crude and nasty, you can just use HTML's table and div elements.

For page-tiling stuff Facelets works well. The actual display subdiivision can be done using HTML or using JSF elements such as panelGrid. I don't really recommend using raw HTML on JSF pages myself, but I've done so occasionally.

RichFaces also has some extension tags that may be useful. Look at the RichFaces "panel" tag and its relatives. They can be used to make a display look very portal-like even though it isn't actually a portal. Additionally, some of the panel options include the ability to grow or shrink panes dynamically.