generic portal question

[Peng Zhou]

I just start to look at portal. Have 2 questions that puzzles me.

1. portal --> book --> page --> portlet If a portlet has a form and be submitted, will the whole page refresh or just that portlet window? or it varies among vendor's implementation?

2. if there are multiple web apps deployed in a server (maybe cluster), or different servers, is there a simple way to aggregate them via portal tech except URL portlet?

thanks

[David O'Meara]

"pengzhou",
Welcome to the JavaRanch.

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thanks,
Dave

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

If a portlet is invoked, the whole portal page will refresh. That's just the way it is.

I know there is work to integrate Ajax into JSR-268, and some people create all sorts of problems trying to use IFrames in the portal, but for the most part, the whole page refreshes. This is another reason why using the portlet cache mechanism is so pivotal.

As far as 'portalizing' we apps, one easy way is to use web clipping, which from my experience, I've seen work fairly well in WebSphere and Jetspeed.

Which vendor do you use?

Happy Portal.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Peng Zhou]

Thank you, Cameron. Using IFrame or Ajax does achieve the goal. It will benefit all developers + apps if this feature is provided by portal implementation vendors. Otherwise, I can image the error/issue by each app's developers.

Sorry, I don't know what "web clipping" means. Currently we are using weblogic and having 10 web-apps deployed. The target is to create a center "workbench" web-app to control the whole look & feel and host common render functions used by other web-apps.

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

You don't know what web clipping is?

Boy, do I have the tutorial for you:

Portal Development and Administration Tutorials and Examples (Web Clipping)

It allows you to scrape an existing website. It's now without flaws, but it gets non-portal content portalized quickly.

Cheers!

-Cameron McKenzie

[Peng Zhou]

It is interesting after reading your webclipping demo. One special protlet can render a snippet of or whole foreign page. If not portlet, it can be easily done by jstl import tag piping to a reader to selecting that part. If needed, converting all foreign relative url to absolute url.

But I don't know how to handle the dynamic stuff without too much effort. i.e. http://foreign_url/resource?data=dyanmic

thanks

[Peng Zhou]

After reading a bit weblogic portal document, I found "Federated Portals" may be the right choice to aggregate the portlets across several web apps if the vendor is bea.

Thanks