Hello!
Right now I am in process of evaluating available portal solutions. Because I am big cocoon enthusiast I took a deeper look into the cocoon portal-fw and portal blocks.
I would try to summarise the main features I found when played with both portal-framework and portal engine. Please correct me if I am wrong:
- both solutions aim mostly to implement portlet container capabilities
- both solutions are quite similar from the view of sitemap configuration and coplet features
- coplets provide XML feeds and are realized by sitemap pipelines (local) or by accessing any source in the internet (defined by uri)
- authentification is done by authentification-fw but this is not required as this can be replaced by other solution i.e. by container managed security
(http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=106703524221219&w=2)
- user's settings are stored in files (by means of sourcewriter transformer) but they can be persisted by any data store by means of specialized transformers
- final HTML look is created by xsl stylesheet applied after syndicating all coplets in layout template
- other clients (PDA, WAP) can be handled by applying different xsl stylesheet and targeting required markup
- JSR-168 portlet container behaviour will be implemented in portal-engine block to support 3rd party portlet implementations
I still have some questions where I am not sure about answers:
- what will be (or is) the main difference of current portal-framework and new portal engine? What were the main issues that caused rewrite of existing portal-fw to portal engine?
- what exactly will be implemented from JSR-168 spec to portal engine, what components will then be still used from cocoon?
- what future do you see for cocoon as a portal framework when JSR-168 compliant containers will come out (i.e. Jakarta Pluto) and what part of portal application lifecycle should then cocoon cover?
Thanks for your answers and for good job done on cocoon!
Michal
-- MisoD --
Michal Durdina - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ASSET Soft a.s.,
Kosicka 56, Bratislava, 821 08
Slovakia, Europe
