[jboss-user] [JBoss Seam] - Re: Seam and Portal Future

[bsmithjj]

Here's another slant on this topic and your statement:

anonymous wrote : hopefully that seam and portal will be a good match in the future

I did a fair amount of work with JBoss Portal about a year and a half ago.  This last year, I've mainly worked with Seam + Facelets and JSF.  I've recently spent some time reevaluating JBoss Portal.  I've found that with each point release of the portal, the chief integration points between your application (i.e. the various deployment descriptors, and the security API's) tends to change in a non-backwards compatible manner.  Thus, if you were to pick a released version of the portal today (say 2.4.X), and develop a completely customized portal application that featured your look and feel for the pages, and integration with your company's security system - you could expect to redo all this if you wanted to go to version 2.6.  My point in saying this is that's a lot of PAIN just to build an application that is primarily based on the JSR 168 (Portlet) API's.

Also, you should be aware that figuring out the best mix of JSF-Portlet bridge and JSF component sets and coming up with a working configuration that includes all of this plus Seam is a major research project.

Let me contrast the work described above with just using Seam + Facelets (+ whatever my current favorite JSF Component library is).... Basically, Facelets makes it darn easy to build view components and page templates;  furthermore, with JSF EL and Seam, I simply 'declare' in an expression what component or component property, or data collection (model) my system should supply for a view component - it's ridiculously simple.  So I can (and do) make use of this combo of Seam and Facelets to build much richer apps than I could with the Portal.  I can use techniques such as AJAX and/or remoting to make anyone of my view components behave much like a portlet.

Basically, I am saying I think there is no great value in using a piece of technology as complicated as a portal simply to get little boxed pieces of content onto a page with 'questionable decorations' (edit, minimize, maximize, close, etc...).  It's much easier, faster, maintainable, etc... to simply build up a webapp that has similar characteristics using Seam (and, say, AJAX) + Facelets directly.

So you should think carefully about whether you really do need to use the JSR 168 API's as part of building your web application(s).  Simply using Seam + Facelets / JSF and a good component lib (like ICEFaces) will probably yield a better user experience and a better development experience than trying to bridge all this stuff into the JSR 168 request-response lifecycle.


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