Ethos

• JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0
  
• JSR 168: Portlet Specification

JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0

Version 2.0 of the Portlet Specification plans to align with J2EE 1.4, integrate other new JSRs relevant for the portlet, and align with the WSRP specification V 2.0.

JSR 168: Portlet Specification

To enable interoperability between Portlets and Portals, this specification will define a set of APIs for Portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security.

This first version of the Portlet specification will concentrate in the following design goals:

• Client agnostic
• Support for multiple types of clients (multi-device)
• Simple Portlet API
• Support for Localization and Internationalization
• Hot deployment and re-deployment of Portal applications
• Declarative security (same as to the mechanism found in Servlet and EJB specs)
• Architected to support remote execution of Portlets

The Portlet specification will be based on the Servlet specification. It is envisioned that the developer API will be similar to the Servlet API.

The Portlet specification will restrict the use of functions provided by the Servlet API to a subset that makes sense for components providing fragments of a markup page.

Portlets would be able to obtain from their context -via the Portlet API- functions like access to user profile information for the current user, participation in the portal window and action event model, access to web client information, sharing of information with other Portlets and a standard way of storing and retrieving per-user/per-instance Portlet data persistently.

The API will provide a URL-rewriting mechanism for creating links to trigger actions within a Portlet without requiring knowledge on how URLs are structured in the particular web application.

Portlets would be grouped in a Portal Application by bundling them in a single WAR with a Portlet deployment descriptor file. In addition, the API will provide a mean for sharing data among Portlets of the same Portal Application.

Like the Servlet specification, the Portlet specification will allow access to Enterprise Information Systems without imposing restrictions on the type of protocols.

It is an important goal that the design of the Portlet specification would allow implementations to support remote Portlet execution. This design would not address the transport protocol for the remote execution of Portlets, leaving to the specific Portal implementations the support for Portlet remote execution. For example, a proxy Portlet could be used to invoke a remote Portlet.

The Expert group will consider functionality such as support for, parallel execution of Portlets within a single user request, logging, security and personalization.

The Expert group will decide if the specification should include a set of specialized Portlet implementations for common tasks such as syndication (RSS), HTML scrapper, Web Services access, etc.

The Expert Group will evaluate defining a Credential mapping service to allow the Portal application to access resources in other applications not supporting the notion of distributed sessions- on behalf of user.

It is understood that the subject of this JSR is already being addressed by Open Source projects and products from different vendors. The Objective of this JSR is to create a standard for Java Portal Applications, which will help unifying a fragmented area. The expert group will ensure this specification draws appropriately from such projects and products and that it will be based on open standards.

JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0