1. IChannel Support in uPortal 3
Peter Kharchenko
Adam Rybicki
I am no EI expert!

2. Agenda Downward compatibility Implementation options
ChannelAdapterPortlet

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. 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 ?

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

8. 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

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

10. 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)

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