1. Portals in OpenCms
Building JSF and portlet applications in openCms
Presented by: Dipl.-Ing. Helmut Manck
OpenCms conference 2012
25. September 2012
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2. Agenda
What are Portals good for?
• Scenarios, Market Players
• Common Architectural Issues
Portals in OpenCms
• How to build a portal
JSF and Portlets
• How to build a portlet
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3. Scenario: Company Intranet
Typically a mix of content and web applications
Navigation
Content
Content
Process
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4. Architectural approaches
• Method I: Don't use a CMS = All programmatic
• Editors hand over articles to programmers
• Programmers integrate, test and release
• Good for Programmers, Bad for Editors
• Method II: Separate CMS and Applications
• Two independent parts: one CMS-driven, one programmatic driven.
• Clean and sweet until navigation and deep links are an issue.
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5. Architectural approaches
• Method III: Develop within CMS
• Each piece of code is a formatter, JSP-fragment, Template or similar
• Development within (Open)CMS
• Pro: Single location of code
• Con: IDE support, independent testing, technological freedom
• Or you use Portals...
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6. Method IV: Portals
Navigation
Content
Portlet
Portlet
Content
Portlet
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7. Portal Issues
POST /cms/test HTTP/1.1
Host: server
select=7
• There are 3 Portlets on the Page. Who handles this POST-Request?
• Portals must provide:
• Name spacing
• Link Generation
• (with in HTML-Space and the generated URLs)
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8. Java Portlets: JSR-286
• Portlets are like Servlets
• own J2EE-Webapp (.war)
• own data source, jars, configuration, version
• plus a portlet.xml
• Portlets extend GenericPortlet
• “render”: Deliver HTML-Snippet
• “action”: Process POST
• “resource”: Deliver CSS, JS, Ajax
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9. Portlet example
- The Portlet plus some logic classes
- Some JSPs to render the HTML-Snipplets
- J2EE-Configuration plus Portlet-Config
- Build recipe based on maven
- Additional Libs
- Can be developed, tested, debugged locally
with full IDE support (e.g. hot code replace)
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10. Example: Request Flow
1. A HTML-Snippet generates a POST-URL:
<p:actionURL var="target" name="choosemode"/>
<form name="form" action="${target}“ method="post">
2. Form-Submit triggers URL, then redirect to
processAction(request, response)
3. New HTML-Snipplet is rendered.
render(request,response)
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11. Market View
redhat
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12. OpenCms as Portal Server
Pluto Portal
OpenCms 7/8 (Reference implementation
for JSR286)
OpenCms Portal Portal Driver
- Maven Overlay (glue logic)
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13. Anatomy of the Portal
- Storage location of the base wars
- context.xml: the portal needs enhanced
privileges
- web.xml must be heavily modified, spring
support is required by pluto, add some filters
- the driver ( = glue logic ) is referenced here
- Maven overlays the base wars, builds the
final war, Pluto requires a certain Spring
version.
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14. Using the Portlet Support
1. Create an opencmsportal.war
• Usual Setup-Process necessary
• Portlet support enabled, but no templates, formatters or
document types contained.
2. Create an OpenCms Module
• Define Look & Feel, CSS etc.
3. The selected portlet is rendered using API-Calls within the
formatter (usually)
PortletTag tag = new PortletTag();
tag.setPortletId(id);
tag.setPageContext(copy);
tag.doStartTag();
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15. Creating the Portlet Module
OpenCms 8 Module
- Rest of the Module not affected
- Formatter for a Portlet
- Document Type Definition for a Portlet
- Maven Pom to build the Module
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16. JSF and Rich Client Widgets
• Several JSF Libraries provide nice, easy to use widgets
• Primefaces, Richfaces, ICEfaces
• Lots of widgets, mostly easy to use
• Ajax support “built in”, Partial updates, Push-Support
• E.g. Primefaces Datatable
• JSF is gaining traction
• Application development gets much faster
• Applications get a “rich client” look & feel
• How to integrate into a portlet?
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17. JSR 301 and JSR329
• JSR301 and JSR329:
• Transparent bridge between JSF and Portals
• A JSF Application can be made Portlet just by adding a few Jars and
some configuration (portlet.xml)
• Portal vendors are pushing this technology
• RedHat (Jboss)
• Liferay
• The Liferay-JSF-Bridge can be used with OpenCms/Pluto!
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18. Component Overview
Tomcat 6
OpenCms Pluto with
HTTP GET Portal Portal Driver
dispatch()
- Render or Action
Portlet B
JSF Bridge Webapp
Primefaces
Portlet A
Webapp
Plain Portlet
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19. Real world example
Example: A simple voting portlet
• Backend: Spring/Hibernate/AOP
• Frontend: Primefaces
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20. Fragen?
Dipl. Ing. Helmut Manck
Geschäftsführer
eonas IT-Beratung und Entwicklung GmbH
Pascalstr. 10A
10587 Berlin
Germany
helmut.manck@eonas.de
Telefon +49-30-3980 522 – 10
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