[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss Portal] - Re: Layout System

[wesleyhales]

This is a great conversation to get started...

In response to the proposed frameworks + their templating systems:
1) Tiles has their "Composite Pattern", which is just a layout and decoration framework (Same for SiteMesh). Do we really want a decoration based templating system for portlet windows and the theme framework. I'm sure we will for actual portlet development, but these frameworks are designed with your basic webapp in mind.

2) Wicket is generating markup from code which is cool, and the same for GWT. There is a use case for these frameworks and a lot of it stems from Java developers not wanting to deal with browser quirks and other UI stuff that they know nothing about. The portal budget allows for a senior UI developer so the hardcore developers can focus on what they need to focus on.

To start with we need to understand why we are choosing one of these frameworks. And that brings up another good point. We are talking about two things 1) a web framework and 2) a layout/templating system. So, a few of my questions are:

1) What are we designing for? If it's a grid based design that has a fluid layout (I'm assuming), then we should define that here. Is this just for the dynamic layout of ever changing portlet windows?

2) Are we creating our own components for the presentation framework, or should we try to leverage some OOB ones.

3) Based on the answer of number 1 + 2 we can more closely evaluate potential frameworks and eliminate others.

That's all I have for now, but there will be more ;)






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