DOJO with Portals

[Chris Boldon]

Does this book cover implementing dojo with portals? I have had issues in the past when I have multple portlets on a page using the same dojo function.

[Frank Zammetti]

It does not. I'm a big detractor of portal technology, so I avoid it like the plague. I have no experience with Dojo is a portal environment, so the book doesn't mention it at all.

[Amit Batra]

Hi Frank,
Let me apologize first to OP, it is not my intention to hijack the thread but I believe his question was answered.

My question is about what Frank said about portals. Though this is not related to your book, I know, but just to get a sense of what I should learn to 'obsolete proof' myself a bit for the future, would you mind telling me why it is you feel that way about portal technology?

[Frank Zammetti]

My company got burned when we tried to go with portal technology... now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that much of the problem, perhaps even most of the problem, was really our chosen implementation (IBM)... even given that...

I think the whole portal stack is way too complex. Again, IBM is known for over-engineered solutions, but I don't think it's just them.

Second, the whole point of a portal is kind of redundant any more given the rise of Ajax. For example, we've had great success building an application at work that essentially houses many of our back-office apps in one place. In other words, it's to large degree a portal! But the code is much simpler, it works great, and we didn't need to include all the technology of portals.

I also think it's true that portals were a bit of a fad a few years ago that didn't really catch on, whatever the reasons. I talk to few people theses days that are doing portals. That's not to say they may not catch on still down the road, but for now my experience is that they aren't too relevant.

[Mike Farnham]

Don't know if Chris figured out or received a solution for dealing with multiple portlets on the same "rendered" page with the same javascript functions, but the portlet spec does provide the portlet namespace. The portlet namespace allows each portlet to have its own version or personalized version of the same javascript function.

Having to do this, may be an example of the complexities Frank refers to as part of the portal stack.

[Chris Boldon]

You hit the nail on the head Mike. I was really wondering if Dojo offered an out of the box way to differentiate between function versions.

I'd disagree that portals are obsolete altogether. Portals saw an initial retraction with the increased usage of RIA technologies. Quality portal implementations took a step back at that point and implemented many of these RIA abilities and compatibilities.

The concepts of a portal are not altogether abstractly different from the concept of SOA. It is another way of abstracting yourself so you do not have to work as tightly in the view, nor reuse certain aspects. It also provides the added advantage of handling your caching and authentication/authorization.

One of the biggest difficulties I have with JavaScript is the logical separation. With modals appearing and disappearing, and pages changing dynamically, the code can become a bit of a nightmare. A proper portal implementation is useful in this case.

AJAX works very well with the portal model. Though more precisely leveraging the portal 'model' than a portal per se, look at iGoogle and Yahoo.

[J Holland]

As a portal developer that is leveraging Dojo inside Weblogic application, I can say that it has been working well, but we have also had to meet some challenges. Our Dojo Applications having trouble rendering in SSL for example.

In regards to your question on handling different versions; with the release of Dojo 1.1.1, you can "scopeMap" different versions. Therefore you can have different versions of the same functions. See http://dojotoolkit.org/book/book-dojo/part-3-javascript-programming-dojo-and-dijit/multiple-versions-dojo-page

As Ajax Technologies continue to mature, I think it is a good contender to replace portal models.

Thanks,
JHolland

[Chris Boldon]

VERY helpful

Thank you everyone who replied in this thread.