As Portlets is coming to its full swing, people around big web-applications are discussing about porting to Portlet technology. I was recently working analysing the efforts required to port an existing web-application to a propritery portal server. Such issues are appearing in greater numbers now. One of the alternative is to rebuilt the whole applications from scratch (reusing some components if possible, which ruled out if the backend is not in Java). But one approach could be to use WSRP support to use the existing applications in portal and add over it what ever new functionality we need as portal application.
As i am not much into WSRP, I am not sure how far this idea is implementable. Secondly, Peoplesoft Portal 8.9 and Oracle Portal supports JSR168 specifications but through WSRP. Is this the right way to do so? Wont it have an affect in efficiency of the portal application? Is it not better to provide the JSR168 support as a part of developement environment (without using WSRP) as is done in IBM,BEA and open sources like eXo, Liferay etc?
4 comments:
I have built and deployed a number of JSR-168 portlets and deployed them in Oracle Portal 10.1.4 successfully. The process involves creating a WSRP layer in the AS and (for me) an upgrade of the Portal to support WSRP type portlets but I have been impressed with this style of implementation.
I haven't deployed to production yet so have yet to see how it scales.
Better than I expected though.
Julian Ford
Thanks julian for sharing your experience. But wouldnt it have been nice if WSRP layering was not at all there for normal JSR168 portlets in Oracle portal server.
I think it's the departure from the "common" approach that takes a bit of getting used to. I couldn't find a lot of documentation about the upgrade and the use of WSRP required an upgrade to the portal - with all the overhead that that carries (ref the manual post-install tasks for example!).
On the positive side, our client wants to use the portlets in a hosted environment and (as discussed elsewhere) this brings reduced support effort and a distributed approach offers the potential for better performance.
A nice bonus is that we could more easily deploy the content to our own non-Oracle intranet, or Sharepoint which wouldn't be possible with a "normal" implementation.
Depends on the context of course. I am (now) much more positive about Oracle's approach having sucessfully implented it!
Julian
I got what want to suggest. Yes, WSRP is very beneficial when one is implementing it in distributed environment.
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