Have you ben looking on the proposal for the new Portlet API?
I think uite a few of your issues are already picked up there.
E.g.:
* user dependent portlet state
* a portlet event mechanism for communication between portlets and
framework to portlets. This results in a two phase processing (event loop,
rendering loop).
* namespace separation
Yet to come is a proposal for PARs, a portlet deploying mechanism
comparable to WARs.
Still, why don't you set up a demo? Especially the idea of Worklets sounds
interresting.
ingo.
At 18:09 02/14/01, Stefan Reich wrote:
>Hi everybody - sorry for the long posting -:
>
>We are a group of students taking part in a course focused on web application
>development. We've been working on/with jetspeed for some time now, focusing
>on extending the possibilities in portlet development. We have a working
>implementation of our ideas.
>
>We'd like to hear some feedback from you, regarding:
> * what do you think about our work?
> * are there other existing approaches to solve the same problems?
> * if not, is there a chance to integrate these things? how would the
> next steps for doing so look like?
>
>Basically, the main tasks we adressed were
>
>1. that all portlets on a page share a common namespace, which may lead to
> unwanted collisions between independent portlets
>
>2. that portlets currently can not hold any state information
>
>3. that there might be portlets which take a long time to compute their
> results, but the user should get a page immediately
>
>4. two portlets on one page may work on the same set of data - when that
> happens, inconsistencies can occur when one portlet updates the data from
> user input while the other has already rendered its output
>
>* To solve problem 1., we added a parameter called namespace into the psml
>file:
>
>
> <entry type="ref" parent="NamespaceTestPortlet">
> <parameter name="namespace"
> value="namespace_1"/>
> <layout position="4"/>
> </entry>
>
> <entry type="ref" parent="NamespaceTestPortlet">
> <parameter name="namespace"
> value="namespace_2"/>
> <layout position="5"/>
> </entry>
>
>Our Portlet then uses a function for separating its variables into the
>different
>namespaces (withNamespace("name") would return "namespace_1.name" in the first
>portlet, and "namespace_2.name" in the second portlet).
>
>* To solve problems 2 and 3, we introduced a new concept called Worklet.
>Worklets
>are independent objects, which are kept in a central worklet repository. The
>portlets can lookup and insert worklets into the repository. These can be used
>to preserve state information and to let computations run in the background.
>
>Also, different portlets may access the same worklet, and that way share
>state.
>
>We have standardized mechanisms for expiring worklets started by users who
>are no longer active. On the other hand, we have also encapsulated the usual
>"isrunning", "isdone", "shouldbeterminated" and so on states used for long
>running worklets (MarathonWorklets).
>
>* For the first three problems, we have not changed the Jetspeed framework.
>However to adress problem 4, we added a new function, called update, and
>processing a request works in two phases now:
>
>- call update on all Portlets (there is a dummy implementation for backward
> compatibility)
>- call getContent on all Portlets
>
>That way, we can ensure that the results of the requests are consistent when
>the actual output is generated.
>
>If anyone is interested, we can set up a demo page on one of the
>university's servers here.
>
>Cu... Stefan, Stefan, Jens
>
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