Re: Controller servlet for JSPs in Portal???

Richard Levy <richard.levy_at_bis.co.uk> wrote:

> we`re just starting to play with Portal, with a view to implementing
> Portlets using the JPDK.
> The project is basically a port of an existing JSP/JAVA application, where
> the controller framework used is Jakarta-Struts. This is not supported in
> the version of Portal we have to used, so we`d like to develop our own
> framework based around a 'master' controler servlet, which catches all
> 'Posts'.
> We have a framework already written in Java, but we dont know how to
> incorporate it into Portal so that we can still use JSP`s also.
> Do we simply have to extend the RenderManager class and use that class as
> our Renderer for the portlet. If we do this, how do we identify the
> controller servlet so we can send the 'action' of each post to it.

We've evaluated Portal for a project, but we found it so limited to the point of being unworkable. After some weeks of cursing at the crappy editing of code in HTML forms, after a brief idea of using HTT to achieve a reasonable minimum of separation between presentation and logic, in the end we decided to use only the Login Server functionality from our JSP/Servlets application, since the project comprises many different applications from different providers.

However, after seeing what the Login Server does with HTML, login pages and JavaScript, we decided to throw away Portal completely, and to use OC4J instead (Orion, that is). I can confirm that Struts works fine with Orion, and so many different tag libraries do work fine.

My advice: stay away from Portal, at all cost. But if you really want to port a JSP application to Portal, look at a complete rewrite (and a great waste of time and brain cells, if you don't mind my personal opinion).

[Note followups set to *.tool, I think Portal and such topics are better discussed there]

Good luck
Sebastiano Pilla Received on Sun Sep 23 2001 - 05:09:00 CDT