IChannel Support in uPortal 3 Peter Kharchenko pkharchenko@unicon.net Adam Rybicki arybicki@unicon.net I am no EI expert!

Agenda Downward compatibility Implementation options ChannelAdapterPortlet

History When uPortal 2 was being designed, there were no uPortal 1 sites in production. When uPortal 2 was released, there were fewer than 5 sites in production. We now have hundreds of sites in production.

How others support downward compatibility? Tomcat will not disable support for “old” servlet and JSP versions. EJB 3 greatly improves ease of development, but no container vendor will abandon support for 2.1 or older. Commercial vendors will not abandon their proprietary (pre-JSR-168) interfaces. IChannel is an example of a mature interface, which in some respects may be superior to ‘168.

What level of compatibility? To be 100% compatible with 2.x, the uPortal 3 implementation would have to include the entire 2.x framework. Many channels out there. How many rely on internal framework classes? Probably the least portable channels were developed by developers most familiar with the framework itnernals. Proposal: ask the community to send us all of their “import org.jasig.portal.*” lines of code. How will common framework services be accessed by uPortal 3 portlets?

Alternatives ChannelAdapterPortlet Standalone uPortal2 instance provides channel lifecycle, serialization Standalone uPortal2 instance tweaked to deliver standalone channels Internal request dispatching WSRP Native support for channels in uP3 ChannelAdapterPortlet would be cleaner Other ideas ?

ChannelAdapterPortlet Maintains channel instances Similar to ChannelManager in uP2 Takes care of Channel lifecycle Parameter processing Serialization Caching Provides access to framework services

ChannelAdapterPortlet Instance management IChannel: one instance per portlet window can be maintained in portlet session IMultithreadedChannel: one instance will rely on channel to clean up internal maps based on the events sent by adapter

ChannelAdapterPortlet Channel lifecycle init() – setStaticData() processAction() – pre-setRuntimeData() render() – setRuntimeData()+renderXML() portal events Parameters processing is straightforward no more baseActionUrl Make all URLs actionURLs?

ChannelAdapterPortlet Access to uP2 interfaces, support classes and services uP2-api.jar + uP3 implementations Basics: Channel interfaces ChannelRuntimeData, ChannelStaticData IPerson Further: IAuthorizationPrincipal ICC Registry, JNDI context (wait for IPC)

ChannelAdapterPortlet Static services GroupServices, AuthorizationService, EntityNameFinderService RDBMServices XSLT utils CAR support CarServices Packaging/deployment