Deploying portlets by the UI

I discovered the blog post of Carsten Ziegeler.

Deploying portlets by the UI… Humm, my first reaction was:
“Yeah this is cool! But what is the real enterprise use case for this?”. It is probably a very nice feature for demonstration during a pre-sale meeting, but do you think the sysadmin wake up one day and decide to
deploy a portlet in production?

Personally, i don’t think so.

Since we are talking about “Enterprise Portal“, the deployment of new portlet should be integrated to the deployment model used by sysadmin. This could be done by the administration console of the application
server, administration scripts, … Portals should not reinvent the wheel here, and simply leverage the standards (JSR88 for example) and best practices already in place. Why? take a simple example: what about the deployment of a new portlet in a cluster environment? App server do manage that. When testing and developing you can easily use the hot deployment that most of the application server support. (no need to go to the portal to deploy a new version of the portlet.)

We have some features for the upcoming release of portal 2.6 to make more easy to develop, mashup and publish application directly on the server by the portal UI. We will provide an interface to write gadgets and webservices directly from the portal thanks to WS 2.0, groovy and gadgets.

Portlets are made for developing complete and rich business applications, this is what we do for our Collaboration Suite, ECM, and others.

Gadgets + WS will be for creating more lightweight application for a dashboard, creating quickly and easily small applications. (that could leverage services provided by business applications. For such tools, where do create composite application with gadgets you want to be able to have a very simple lifecycle management this is why at eXo you can easily write services and gadgets directly from your Portal.

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.