Sun Web Space training (day 2)

Tuesday, 30 june 2009, Brussels / Belgium.

Another hot day in Brussels. Time to get on and discover more features inside Web Space.

Architecture

The morning began with a session that went deeper into the architecture of Web Space. The key argument is that everything inside Web Space is divided with well defined interfaces. So upgrading Webspace won’t give problems, because everything is component based.

We also had a little look at the lifecycle of a portal page, and what happens when a client sends a request. There are some nice features where one can introduce Hooks, and implement them into the sequence of a request lifecycle. Hooks behave somewhat like servlet filters. For instance one can make a Hook for filtering XSS scripting, or doing asynchronous calls.

Pages and Page Layouts

The look & feel of a portal on Web Space goes way ahead compared with a normal web application. There are several color, layer and theme settings one can configure. All these themes and layers are deployed as ordinary WAR files on the Glassfish container. So when some theme is broken, one can simply undeploy it from the server, and nothing goes down. Themes also have some META settings stored inside an XML file, where one can see if it is compatible with the current Liferay portal version.

The themes themselves are very impressive. One can make full fledged desktop views with context menu’s and windows, like a normal windows kernel. I don’t know if this would be applicable into a serious enterprise environment, but it looks really neat. And it gives a real feel on working with different applications integrated on one workspace.

Permissions

It’s extremely easy to setup a community page with a blog, with extra permissions. Permissions in the form of own defined roles, gives you extra options what a user is authorized to do inside a portlet. We can make separate roles for different authorizations.

For instance with VIEW only rights. Or with all permissions, or just a subset of available permissions. When defining a new page inside a community one can select the roles and attach users inside these roles. By testing out the different users one can instantly see the available functionalities in the portlet that is rendered on the page.

Content Management

Web Space has an own content management component based on JSR-170. It offers enough functionality for integrating content and documentation in the workflow. There are a number of portlets available for displaying content. One can also make their own content templates based on Velocity scripts. It’s fairly intuitive to consruct a portlet page with a CMS display portlet to get a hang on CMS.
Configuring a display portlet with a custom made template, one can configure the template by giving all the fields some value for presentation.