Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

Today Adobe annouced ColdFusion 9 . I worked on ColdFusion long back and I am sure that it has changed a lot since then. I have not used Coldfusion for a long time now, but what caught my attention today is the support for JSR 168 and JSR 286 portlet standards. Support for JSR 168/ JSR 286 in Coldfusion means that Coldfusion users can use readily available portlets like SyncEx with Coldfusion. It gives Coldfusion users more pluggable components as well as give portlet vendors like SyncEx a little more market :-)

JSR 168 (Potlet 1.0) specification doesn't clearly suggest any mechanism for the inter-portlet communication i.e. communication between two portlets. This was regarded as one of the major short-comings for JSR 168. Though most of the vendors had their own extensions to JSR 168 for managing inter-portlet communication, use of any of those methods defeat the very purpose of JSR 168. In absence of any well defined sophisticated mechanism, JSR 168 developer had to rely upon either PortalContext or Application Scope of Session for sharing information between the protlets. JSR 286 has come up with a well defined model to achieve inter-portlet communication. There are two primary ways by which inter-portlet communication can achieved as follows - 1. Public Render Parameters 2. Portlet Events There are pros and cons of each method. Though the biggest advantage with Portlet Events method is that an object can be passed from one portlet to another as opposed to merely "String" in c...

We are starting a new project on JSR 286 and wondering what should be the best IDE for JSR 286 portlet development. The project is on IBM, so IBM RAD (Rapid Application Developer) was the first choice. Though as of now the latest production release 7.0 doesn't support JSR 286 and 7.5 version which supports JSR 286 is just in beta stage. IBM has not communicated any clear date for GA. I think it leaves us to "Portal Pack 2.0 for NetBeans 6.1", a plugin for NetBeans. I have not tested it yet, but it says the support of JSR 286. I am not sure whether it has embedded JSR 286 container for testing portlet within IDE or not? I'll check and update on this. By the way, have you started developing JSR 286 portlets? If yes, which IDE do you use?

JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) final release is available to download from the JCP website. Here is the direct link - http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr286/index.html Happy Portlettting.

You would be happy to know that the JSR 286 is approved and the final version should be available soon. By the time, you can have a look at final draft here . I am sure JSR 286 will prove a big leap forward in success of Java Portals. I congratulate spec lead Stefan Hepper and all expert group members for the efforts and hard work.