It always bothered me that the JSR168 <portlet:actionURL /> and <portlet:renderURL /> tags didn’t encode their HTML character entities. The lack of encoding causes your HTML 4 or XHTML 1 markup to fail automated validation. After flipping through a bit more of the JSR286 spec, it mentions that in JSR168 “the behavior in regards to XML escaping URLs written by the tag library was undefined” 1. So, some vendors may have encoded and some may not have (as of 2.7 JBoss Portal, for example, does not).
The Perfect Portlet Markup
I thought I’d throw together a quick precursor to another post I plan on finishing in the next few days. This post is about portlets - or, how to structure the HTML markup for a JSR168/JSR286 portlet, to be more specific.
I’ve worked on theming portal user interfaces for a few years now, primarily on IBM WebSphere Portal and JBoss Portal. On WebSphere, you develop what’s called a ’skin’ - where the markup for a given portlet lives. JBoss has a similar but more granular concept called ‘renderers’. Being a big fan of the principle of semantic markup or POSH, I’ve come to think that all portlets should have the same general shell or HTML markup.
The Post Redirect Get Pattern
Sometimes I look at old draft blog entries and ask myself “what was I thinking?”. Every once in a while, though, I look at an old draft post and say “hey, that’s pretty cool!”. This article fell into the pretty cool category, not so much for the content, but the example app, so I hope you enjoy it (OK, you can skip to the end now).
There’s a long-standing, accepted pattern for handling form submissions in web applications; it’s usually called the post redirect get pattern. The goal of the pattern is to prevent the payload of a HTTP POST request from being stored in the browser history.
New Book: JBoss Portal Server Development - Sample Chapter Download
Packt Publishing recently published a book on JBoss Portal; the book, titled JBoss Portal Server Development, is written by Ramanujam Rao - a JavaEE architect who currently works for Nationwide. Packt sent me a copy and asked that I write a review of the book, which I plan on doing in the next few weeks.
Until then, Packt has made available a sample chapter of the book - JBoss Portal Server Development, Chapter 6: Portals and AJAX (download the sample chapter at: http://www.packtpub.com/files/jboss-portal-server-development-sample-chapter-6-portals-and-ajax.pdf).
Spring Portlet MVC Implicit Model
Do you use Spring Portlet MVC? Have you ever noticed the ImplicitModel request parameter in your URL? It looks something like:
org.springframework.web.portlet.mvc.ImplicitModel=true
Well, it’s a Spring Portlet MVC 2.5 feature and I was scratching my head trying to figure out what it does. It’s set by Spring under the covers, so I dug into their source code to understand it and thought I would share.
In response to JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance
I have to admit, I can totally relate to Eric Spiegelberg’s article, JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance.
It’s a great article; in case you don’t have time to check it out, Eric’s main thesis is that:
the portal architecture lacks enough technical advantages and distinguishing features to warrant an increase in acceptance.
Annotation-based Spring Portlet MVC Lifecycle
Jared Richardson spoke at a Richmond Java Users Group meeting I attended last week; his topic was about investing in yourself and your career - what he called career 2.0. At one point during the presentation, he noted that “if you can’t draw something, you don’t understand it”, which motivated me to finish a blog post I started a while back about Spring Portlet MVC.
I gave a presentation at CapTech’s Feed Your Brain series about using Spring Portlet MVC’s annotation-driven development style, and I wanted to diagram how the lifecycle works under the covers.
JBoss.com Forum Feeds with Yahoo Pipes
I’ve always been an open source fan and for the past 2 or 3 years I’ve been working with JBoss products - lately JBoss Portal. So, I decided I want to become more active in the JBoss Portal forums on JBoss.com - unfortunately, though, their forums aren’t RSS-enabled and I’m a big RSS user.
So, I decided to use one of my favorite, free web-tools - Yahoo Pipes - to build an RSS feed for the JBoss.com forums.
Continue reading →
Securing AJAX Servlets in JBoss Portal
Before the Portlet 2 specification (JSR286), the recommended method for adding AJAX functionality to a JSR168 portlet was to deploy an additional servlet to the portal server (either inside the same WAR as your portlet(s) or in a stand-alone WAR) to handle asynchronous requests. Requests to these servlets are then handled by the servlet container as opposed to being routed through the portlet container, so they don’t automatically inherit the security context from the portal, as your portlets would.
The goal of this article is to describe how to enable security in your AJAX servlets in JBoss Portal 2.6.
JBoss Portal 2.7 supports JSR286, which has features built into portlets for serving AJAX requests. So while this technique may be less useful in that environment, nothing precludes the use of AJAX servlets in the 286 environment, so this technique may still come in handy.
Compress your JBoss Portal Theme with pack:tag
The goal of this article is to show you how to use pack:tag to optimize the performance of your JBoss Portal theme. I’ve used this approach on a production JBoss Portal 2.6 implementation and tested the approach out in version 2.7.
JBoss Portal has a feature-rich theme framework where CSS and javascript resources are included in the Portal; building a custom theme is easy. Pack:tag is an open source project that optimizes performance for java-based web apps; it provides a JSP tag library that automatically minifies, compresses, and combines CSS and javascript resources.
As more rich features and dynamic components reach your portal, larger AJAX frameworks and CSS libraries are required to support them. Large downloads will not only make your Portal load slower, but will also take longer to execute when using the Portal. Also, Portals are no longer accessed solely inside the firewall, many companies use them to power external facing sites - so few assumptions should be made about client bandwidth. Compressing your Portal theme with pack:tag will lead to faster downloads and page response time.
