Jetspeed neophyte - initial comments.

[Stephen Riek <st...@yahoo.co.uk>]

I've been playing with Jetspeed for the better part of a day
and am pleased to report that I haven't encountered any real
problems (yet!) - it started fine, and I was surprised how
easy it is to create a rudimentary portlet. 

Some initial comments and questions come to mind.
   
1. Finding resources is sometimes difficult. Thank goodness for
   Google caching the Portal Howto, and thanks to somebody on 
   this mailing list making the .war file available :)

2. Continuing from this, am I myopic or is the populate-mysql.sql
   file not in the full binary .war package ? 
   
3. According to the "Portal How To", "starting with version 2.0 
   of Jetspeed, ECS will be deprecated."
   I actually welcome this because ECS may be fine for engineers
   but it results in the most unappealing webpages using basic html :-)
   Anyway, what will replace ECS ? 
   And how far off is Jetspeed v2.0 ? 

4. Yes, Jetspeed was quite slow initially. Then I removed some 
   of the portlets (xmlhack and some other newsfeed) and it improved.
   
5. Hitting "back" never works, the browser always reports "page 
   has expired".

6. Is there any documentation for all the variables in the .vm
   files ?  There's stuff like $clink and $l10n and I have no
   idea where they came from. 
   
7. The "Customize portlet" page for all portlets shows 2 pulldowns,
   namely "Skin" and "Security ID".  I think that these aren't
   really of interest to my prospective users. How do I customize
   the "Customize portlet" page ? 

Some of the above are just comments, but if anybody could help
with the question marks above, any and all feedback is much
appreciated. Thank you, 

Stephen.





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Customizing the maximized content ?

[Stephen Riek <st...@yahoo.co.uk>]

Hello again Jetspeeders, 

I'm actually starting to wonder if Jetspeed is suitable 
for my intended application, or whether I understand the
 portal paradigm completely. 

I've noticed that when you click on the "Maximize" icon 
for the portlets that come with Jetspeed, you pretty much
see the same content but across the page, which doesn't 
actually strike me as that useful. I would have thought
it more useful to have just the abstracts or a summary of
information when the portlet is "restored"* and much more
indepth content when it is maximized. How can this be 
achieved ? 

What I'm trying to do is build a company intranet. 
We'll have different portlets for HR/payroll, training, 
maintenance, inventory.  Now, let's take the "training"
portlet, I'd like a user to be able to customize it 
by checking the skills that she is interested in. She
will see just 3 of the most recent courses in the portlet
module when it is "restored"* but when it is maximized,
she will see all the courses that she has expressed 
interest in, perhaps listed over multiple webpages.


Is this possible ? If so, could somebody please point me
in the right direction for this ? I'm looking at the 
AbstractPortlet in the API javadoc but there seems to be
just one getContent(), where I would have expected a portlet
to have something like getMaximizedContent(). Also, where
would the user's preferences on the customize page be stored?

Or have I completely misunderstood the portal paradigm and
in fact, each portlet is just a jumping off point to a 
standalone webapp or website ? (which is the way that 
the Jetspeed examples seem to be implemented).

Thank you very much

Stephen.

* Sorry, I made up this terminology. How do you refer to 
a portlet that is not "maximized" and  not "minimized" ? 
I'm going to call it "restored" since that's the ALT tag
of the icon I have to click in order to reach this state. 




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