Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 - (Page 62)

d09saund_p4ds 7/14/08 10:23 AM Page 62 Core Technology .NET DEVELOPMENT & THE IBM WEBSPHERE PORTAL SERVER continued from page 59 • Portlet Preferences. User-dependent data, usually acquired from the portlet in Edit mode, can also be used via the PortletPreferences node of portlet.xml (Listing Two). Portlets can read/write preferences in the processAction phase but can only read in the render phase. Transient data comes from two sources: • Session data, which is handled just like any web application. To prevent two portlets from using the same Session variable, the name of the portlet is automatically prefixed by the portlet container to each Session variable defined in the portlet. • Modes and Window State, where all portlets support View (default), Edit, and Help modes. If the Edit mode is implemented, users can change the portlet configuration. This type of configuration information can be persisted anywhere you choose—in Session or in a datastore. Help mode displays help about using the portlet. A number of custom modes can also be implemented (see JSR 168). sd Lifecycle Portal/Portlet Container Client Request processAction() Portlet A Portlet B Portlet C render() HTML fragment render() HTML fragment render() HTML fragment Page The portlets can be rendered in parallel Figure 1: Portlet lifecycle. Listing One Mainsoft for Java EE, Portal Edition Within Mainsoft for Java EE, Portal Edition (www.mainsoft.com), the JSR 168 API is reproduced in the .NET namespace javax.portlet, mirroring the Java portletapi.jar. .NET developers have full access to the entire API. The vmw.PortletUtils class lets you access the request and response objects; see Listing Three. From these objects, you can access the entire functionality of the JSR 168 spec. Listing Four shows how portlet preferences can be stored, while Listing Five shows how the portlet can be read back—a useful technique for preserving data across user sessions. Mainsoft for Java EE, Portal Edition provides a set of ASP.NET controls that automatically apply the WebSphere Portal styles to the controls. However, ASP.NET developers can use any of the standard controls (if desired). These pick up the WebSphere theme and skin if you use the correct portal styles. Once the code is ready for compilation, the tool automatically converts the MSIL to Java bytecode, creates a standard WAR file, 62 $?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> This is a test portlet A test portlet A Test Portlet GhDynamicPortlet text/html VIEW Test Portlet Test Test and deploys it to the WebSphere Portal. You can debug code directly in Visual Studio as long as the Portal debugging service is turned on. Listing Two userData Sample JSR 168 Application in ASP.NET One benefit of portals is the ability to perform integration at the UI layer, letting a portal page update multiple back-end systems simultaneously. To enable this, it is essential that portlets share data. WebSphere interportlet communication is facilitated by a broker that lets portlets exchange similarly typed properties. Essentially, the source portlet must define a WSDL file that specifies an output message (see Listing Six), while target portlets must define a WSDL file that specifies the related input message format (Listing Seven). The WSDL files are fairly standard except within the operation node. Referring to Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l September 2008 http://www.mainsoft.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation With Erik Demaine Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development Building a Robust Development Environment Real Users Really Matter Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm The Android Mobile Phone Platform Managing Application Thread Use Signalling Integer Overflows in Java .NET Development & the IBM WebSphere Portal Server The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.