Actually, that's a great point. . .couldn't this just be a different
implementation of the PortletInvokerService? One that belongs to the
portal driver. I like that idea.
Eric Dalquist wrote:
Elliot Metsger wrote:
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the feedback - let me just real quick respond here; more
fully formed thoughts to follow -
Eric Dalquist wrote:
I'd like to get my 2 cents in on this.
As much as part of me sees where supporting old pluto 1.0 WARs is a
plus or other random WARs as well.
A larger part of me says the spec says nothing about web.xml magic,
that is container specific and no one should be dealing with a
container specific WAR outside of the webapps (or equivalent)
directory of their container.
I don't think I'm suggesting that we expose any web.xml magic, in fact
I'm trying to encapsulate the 1.0 and 1.1+ magic.
I feel fairly strongly that the deployment process of a portlet WAR
is a portal specific action and something that the Pluto container
should not be concerned with.
So right now the format of a Pluto 1.0 assembled web.xml is tied to a
Pluto 1.0.x container implementation, and similarly Pluto 1.1.0+
assembled wars are tied to the Pluto 1.1.0+ container implementation.
Specifically in 1.1.0+ the PortletEntityImpl and the PortletServlet
have ties in one way or the other to the format of the assembled web.xml.
I'm suggesting that Pluto 1.1.0+ containers grok Pluto 1.0.x assembled
portlets.
I guess I feel like this isn't very good behavior to encourage. I'm not
sure why people are copying already deployed (assembled) portlets from
one container/portal to another. I really feel like we should be making
people work with Plain Old War Files (POWFs?) as much as possible and
assembled WARs should only exist in the servlet container.
Now this is much more my view towards the Pluto container, the driver
can do as it pleases. So if supporting the web.xml magic from other
versions of Pluto or other containers is very compelling I guess I'm
wondering if that support is an optional part of the container. From my
uPortal 3 side of things I'd rather tell people to take their POWFs and
run the uPortal deployer task on them to set them up correctly and copy
them to the correct deployed location. That way I don't have to worry
about supporting changes in some other containers web.xml magic and we
encourage people to write portlets that follow the spec and aren't tied
to a specific container.
So, my earlier suggestion about 1.0 invoker support in the driver could
probably be re-written as, please make support for web.xml magic for
anything other than the current version of Pluto optional.
-Eric
What I hear Chuck saying is make the "grokking" extensible/pluggable.
I see making a more pluggable strategy for the invoker but I would
vote for putting the pluto 1.0 invoker support classes in the pluto
driver and not the container.
Since portlet registration and invocation is a container-specific
process, I'm not sure how that would work. I mean, the classes could
go into the driver, but then the container would depend on the driver
which I think would be not good.
Does that help alleviate your concern, or am I just mis-understanding
- which is _entirely_ possible :-)
-Eric
Charles Severance wrote:
Elliott,
I have a similarly non-direct answer :). As a fan of war file
binary compatibility - even if de-facto, I am interested in having
Pluto 1.1 capable of supporting as many binary war formats as
possible - not *in* the Pluto code - but with extension capabilities
in PortletServlet.
Here is my use case... I lets say that a long time ago, I wrote a
JSR-168 container called XYZPortal perhaps from scratch, and made my
own convention for web.xml hacking. So I have my XYZPortletServlet
and some stuff in my web.xml about portlet classes and servlet URLs.
But I want to drop these wars into a Pluto 1.1.x container with no
modifications to the war. This is what I want to do.
Write a *different* implementation of XYZPortletServlet (perhaps
even one that extends Pluto's Portlet Servlet) - put this
implementaiton up in shared - In this servlet - I look at all my
init parms, paths, etc and *call* stuff in Pluto's PortletServlet so
that these portlets are properly registered with Pluto's portlet
servlet.
My guess is that to write such a "XYXPortletServlet extends
PlutoPortletServlet" would really be quite simple - things like the
paths to servlets might even not matter at all - because the goal is
to register the portlets *into* Pluto 1.1.x - not into XYZContainer.
So while I have no answer for your basic question - as you cruise
through the code - think about the notion of extending
PortletServlet :)
/Chuck
On Mar 11, 2007, at 11:19 AM, David H. DeWolf wrote:
Elliot,
I have a couple of thoughts, but perhaps not a direct answer:
1) Binding the creation of this to the invoker service makes
absolute sense. In fact, since each invoker implementation will
probably utilizes it's own mechanism and may not requires it, I
don't even think it needs to be exposed within it's interface -
just bound to the impl.
2) While you're at it, you may want to consider the effects of
eventually only requiring ONE servlet to be mapped per PORTLET APP
instead of per PORTLET. This is the reason I changed the approach
in the first place. Having everything map to
/PortletInvoker/PortletName allows us to use a wildcard servlet
mapping of /PortletInvoker/* eventually (or a filter for that
matter, which I think we may need anyways eventually to support
portlet filters.
3) Having a service encapsulate this logic is fine.
PortletInvokerUriResolver seems like a good idea to me.
4) In terms of backwards compatibility, in 1.1.x we should be
binarily compatible for sure. The one areas where I think we can
get away with not being compatible is if we want to extend the
OptionalContainerServices interface. We specifically put a note in
the javadocs that impls should be prepared to support additional
optional services and instead of implementing the interface
directly, they should consider extending the default impl to ensure
future versions do not break binary compatibility.
For 1.2.x I think we may deprecate several things and we have the
option of breaking binary compatibility to some extent. Whatever we
do, we need a very clear and straight forward migration plan.
Does that help and answer your questions, at least somewhat?
David
Elliot Metsger wrote:
I'm working on support for Pluto 1.0.x portlets in Pluto 1.1.x and
1.2.x (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PLUTO-325).
Basically, I want a 1.0.x assembled war file to "just work" with
Pluto 1.1.x and above. I don't want people to have to recompile
or munge their 1.0.x web.xml or war files.
As I see it, this involves:
1) mapping the portlet-guid from Pluto 1.0.x web.xml to the
portlet name 2) supporting the Pluto 1.0.x invoker URI.
I have code to commit for this right now (and it works!!! bonus,
right?) but I'm questioning the design for item 2.
Currently the URL used by the DefaultPortletInvokerService is
obtained from the PortletEntity. The PE has the invoker URI
hard-coded. Since I need to support both the 1.0.x and 1.1.0+
invoker URI formats, we need a more pluggable solution. My
thinking is to look up the servlet mapping for the portlet from
the WebAppDD, and get the invoker uri from the servlet mapping.
My question is, where do we plug the functionality in - before I
go committing like a crazy man :)
What I did was have the PortletEntity use a new package-private
PortletInvokerUriResolver class. The advantage of this is that
the PortletEntity interface doesn't change, which is important for
maintaining binary compatibility on the 1.1.x branch.
But I'm wondering if a better, or ultimate, solution is to make
invoker uri resolution the responsibility of the
PortletInvokerService. Makes sense right? If that is the case
then do people agree that one solution is appropriate for 1.1.x
and a second solution is more appropriate for 1.2.x?
Could we - for the 1.2.x solution - remove the getControllerUri()
method from the PortletEntity interface (what is the policy on
binary compat between 1.1.x and 1.2.x, considering our Java 5
requirement for 1.2.x), and move portlet invoker uri resolution
into the PortletInvokerService?
Thanks for your thoughts,
Elliot
