New Wicket Portlet support

• Key: WICKET-647
• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Ate Douma
• Reporter: Ate Douma
• Component/s: wicket-portlet
• Affects Version/s: 1.3.0-beta2, 1.3.0-beta3

Description

I'm providing a new solution for Wicket Portlet support, see also my initial proposal on the wicket-dev list: http://www.nabble.com/A-new-proposal-for-Wicket-Portlet-support-tf3836652.html

As this solution will require a few (but not very much) changes to Wicket core, I'll create a separate branch first to let everyone involved review and test it out.
I'll also create separate sub tasks in JIRA to record the changes required and the new features provided so each can be reviewed individually and we can have step-by-step discussions how to proceed in bringing this solution into the main trunk.

Note: as current Wicket development is getting close to the 1.3.0 release, I don't expect all of this to be merged into the trunk until after the 1.3.0 release.
But some of my proposed changes really are very light and non-intrusive, so I can imagine (and hope) those can be integrated in the trunk even before the 1.3.0 release.
That definitely would make it easier for me to provide portlet support to my own development team using the wicket core trunk and only a few additional patches.
 

Comments

[Ate Douma]

Initial version of wicket portlet support committed

[Senthil Durai]

Hello Ate Douma,

I was about to create an application with wicket, spring, hibernate, ibatis and mssql but we are stopped not to use wicket
because wicket doesn't support portlet(JSR-168). I don't have good experience in portlet projects. but i love wicket.

I tried using wicket 1.3 beta 2 and deployed in websphere 6.1 but my application is not working.
But the same application works in tomcat and jetty. So i have used wicket 1.2.6 for my new application.

The suggested technology for my application is JSF, spring, hibernate, mssql with DOJO. can you comment on this?

If you strongly recommend wicket instead of JSF and DOJO for portlet please give me comparison and a basic sample portlet configuration.

Thanks,
Senthil Durai
[e-mail]

[Ate Douma]

I've continued with extending the portlet support based on the latest 1.3.0-beta3 release.
Because the number of core Wicket changes were too numerous to merge back in the portlet-support branch, I had to start anew and apply my changes by hand to the beta3 codebase instead.

As I've already indicated on the wicket user list yesterday (see: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Portlet-Support-p12415429.html), this turned out to be a good thing as during that process I made lots of improvements and refactored several class and method names to better reflect their purpose.

After I got my original portlet support working again, I continued to improve and fix quite a few issues.

Right now, I think I have almost all the wicket-examples features which are feasible for usage in a portlet working.
Some features though never are going to work, like frameset usage, or direct client-side manipulation of the url (like the locale select boxed which simple append the selected locale to the url).
But I've now got popups as well as modal windows working (yes: even the "source code" viewer now just works!)
And I also encountered a bug in wicket itself for which I already created an issue, WICKET-913, which really isn't portlet specific.

The nicest part I think of the new portlet-support is that it turned out to require very little changes to the wicket core, and AFAIK all of those are transparent, meaning these changes have zero effect on existing plain servlet based applications!

I'm going to create a new 1.3.0-beta3-portlet-support branch based upon the beta3 release and start checking in my new changes there.
After I completed that, committed against the current and a few new subtasks of this issue, I'll also create a new Jetspeed-2.1.2 based demo installer to allow others to review and test it.

I think the new portlet-support now covers most common use-cases and is ready to be used for real portlet development.
In the Jetspeed-2 team there is already quite an interest to rewrite our current administrative portlets in Wicket.
And at my own company we've already started writing our new CMS (http://www.hippo-ecm.org) in Wicket to be deployable as portlet(s) too.

So after I've committed my latest changes I think we should begin discussing about merging this to the trunk.
Ready to roll... :)

[Ate Douma]

With now the last subtask WICKET-658 resolved, I think the overall task of providing initial portlet support for Wicket is complete and usable enough for integrating in the Wicket trunk.

[Jonathan Locke]

september was quite a while ago and i still see a separate branch in SVN. so, when does this code get merged in? i think portlet support in core is a desirable thing.

[Jonathan Locke]

oh, i see... the wiki must be out of date (?)
it still points to this ticket, which is now resolved fixed.