What frontend technologies would you choose for Portlet development?
If you would try to develop user friendly portlets with AJAX / FLEX. And you would want to port them to the JSR 286 standard. What kind of technology would you as web development framework for the front end? Would you use Spring MVC / Wicket / Tapestry / GWT. In the backend we're using Spring combined with the OSGi standard. And for AJAX, would you use Dojo or Jquery?
Good Answers (2)
Dear Ha,
I support using Spring MVC but only partly. There are great things about that that are underestimated, eg. AOP, transactions support. Also injections are great especially that you initialize portlet with no effort at all.
V of MVC is something that I really don't like. M and C are great ;)
For V letter consider Wicket, please. As it was already written it provides a real separation of layer and demand no big effort to learn it.
Spring MVC is okay: since you're already using Spring it will fit in quite nicely with the rest of your application. But I find it quite cumbersome in terms of XML configuration.
Wicket on the other hand, uses NO XML configuration at all, and it provides REAL seperation of UI design (HTML) and UI behaviour (POJO's). You can use the HTML/CSS/JavaScript by a UI designer as is, without the need to add special tags.
Neither of these technologies impose any restrictions on you or force you to do things a particular way like JSF does (which is one of the worst things about JSF IMO).
When I first heard about Wicket I thought: 'O no, not ANOTHER web ui framework!', but I have used it at my current customer and I have really come to like it. It provides you with even more freedom than Spring MVC does.
The downside is that it is not used as much as Spring MVC (yet), so it's probably hard to find an expert on the matter.
Hope this helps you decide.
cheers
Lars
More Answers (6)
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You didn't mention using Netbeans as your IDE and Liferay Portal...
Rohit K
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Rohit K suggests this expert on this topic:
Arnold R
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The main components of my current technology stack are
Extjs, DWR, Spring & Hibernate. Authentication & authorization
is handled by Spring Security 2.0 ( aka Acegi ), caching by ehCache,
site layout by SiteMesh, ...
To standardize the development process and raise the level of quality I use Maven2 and test all major artifacts by applying JUnit.
It took me about two years to build, polish and understand the details
of this technology stack Components, concepts and technologies like JSF, osCache, Seam, Dojo, Webflow, Tapestry, JBoss, ... were once part of this stack but were all added and removed for different reasons.
About a year ago I spend a few weeks on researching JSR-168 & JSR-268 compliant portlet containers and focused on the strength and weaknesses of containers like Exo, LifeRay, Pluto, JetSpeed,oPortal, uPortal, jPortal, ... and the best practices extracted from internal projects who failed or succeeded using portlet containers.
Nowadays I don't consider using a JSR-268 portlet container to be a solution for a centralized hub to handle identity management, workflow and process orchestration and application integration by the usage of some shared infrastructure.
Because I consider this stack to be the fruit of dozens of open source communities and not only the result of my hard work I am happy to share my knowledge whenever required.
On the AJAX side I have used both Dojo and JQuery. I found JQuery much easier and cleaner and at the same time more powerful. It wss possible to write something very nice with a few lines of code. I also have a developer who has tried out GWT on a project and swears AT it rather than by it.
I personally prefer Spring MVC, especially when you are already using Spring framework. Spring is very flexable framework, not like JSP, which is very restricted, and you are forced to use many tags.
Also, JSP is not Ajax friendly - you have to either add am additional servlet just for doing Ajax, or you have to implement some event listener in order to do AJAX with JSF - none of the is a natural way (read this for the details: https://bpcatalog.dev.java.net/nonav/ajax/jsf-ajax/frames.html)
I agree with Marcin, "V" of MVC is not suitable for AJAX - you are not going to redaw the whole screen, only a part of it. (In the most extreme case of AJAX app, there will be no place for V: one page per app, all the consequent steps are replacing a part of the screen)
As for choosing JavaScript lib, I think many libs out there are good enough to do the job (I personally used Prototype and Scriptaculous , Dojo, etc), so it's more personal preference than usage. For example, i think Dojo is too havy.
Since you are using Java, have you read this article?
http://ddj.com/web-development/199203087
Links:
I suggest to use Wicket as web development framework for the front end.
We used EXTJs for Ajax extensively.
