Marc Domenig

The portlet specification defines a standard infrastructure for Web portals in J2EE. While this infrastructure helps reduce proprietary code in HTML applications, it poses a challenge in Rich-Internet Applications (RIA) that have a hard time managing the state of their user interface appropriately. An efficient solution rests with RIA approaches that are based on the half-object + protocol design pattern, a pattern that maintains the state of the user interface (UI) on the server side, a crucial enabler for rich-client portlets. Portlets as defined by the Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 are an emerging standard in developing Web portals. They allow aggregating content, server-side Java applications, and SOAP-based Web Services in a coherent browser front-end that can be configured flexibly. The Portlet Switching Issue Unfortunately, this new standard has a shor... (more)