Re: need help on shindig

[Ryan Baxter <rb...@apache.org>]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Koladiya Kishan <kk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am working on POC for our new project, we are building a application
> which manages documents and it's contents. I want a UI with portlets and
> each portlets represents meta-data contents of particular document so
> basically it's not a social web application.
>
> *Requirement:* Portal we need to build with widgets, all the widgets are
> web application some will be hosted by our container, others may be by
> different containers on different domain. I'm hoping Apache shindig would
> allow us to do this.
>
> *POC Use-case:* I want to create three web application *(i & ii) *two of
> them running on the shindig container but in a different domain and
> *(iii)*third one is running on non-shindig container (a simple
> web-app) in a
> different domain.
>
> *So far what I did:* I checked out source code from SVN, build
> successfully, also added maven archetype in eclipse to create a template
> for shindig web-app. Also deploy the shindig-server.war to tomcat and it's
> up and running fine sample gadget is working fine as well. Also went
> through how to implement own services and inject via Guice.
>
> *Problems:* I am not getting how to create simple gadget with it's own
> container and how to deploy with some basic service implementation. I am
> using shindig maven archetype which is added in eclipse to create new
> shindig web application so is this approach right? if not please suggest me
> alternative.
>
> *Questions:*
>
>    1. Is shindig able to full fill our requirements?
Yes I believe it can.  Although if you want more of the portal UI out
of the box you might want to check out Apache Rave which is built upon
Shindig and has a lot of the portal management built in already.
>    2. How does it handle web application running on different domain while
>    integrating as a widget on the base portal?
This is possible, and is actually a recommended way to deploy your
containers.  There is a review [1] and JIRA [2] opened on this topic,
take a look to learn more about how to do this.
>    3. What is the basic step to create simple hello-world shindig web-app
>    from start to end with one simple service implementation, which has its own
>    simple hello-world gadget and gadget container? (if you can please give me
>    step by step instruction)
The archetype is one example.  You can also take a look at the sample
containers [3] in Shindig.  You also might want to take a look at the
OpenSocial Explorer [4] which is another good sample built upon
Shindig.  I am not sure which services you are trying to implement
though, Shindig has many.
>    4. Right now shindig running on root of the tomcat, if I want to deploy
>    as a non-root what configuration changes do I need to require, I followed
>    available solution for that on website but not working, If I am running as
>    non-root what other things I should take care while deploying my own
>    shindig container?
You SHOULD be able to just change the root of the web app in Tomcat
and Shindig should still work.  Some of the sample containers may not
work as the URLs make some assumptions that Shindig is running at
root.
>    5. Please, throw some light on two other POC use-cases as well, which is
>    written above.
You can certainly have two different containers pointing to the same
instance of Shindig.  Shindig allows for any number of containers and
each one can be configured independently of each other or they can
share configurations.  Generally this is accomplished by specifying a
container.js file in shindig.properties with the
shindig.container.default property.  Then when you load your container
javascript in the client you need to specify the name of the container
so Shindig knows which container configuration to use.
>    6. If I want to use shindig only for portlet then how it is superior
>    then Ext-JS or JSR-168.
I don't have enough experience with them to tell you, sorry.
>    7. Is communication possible between portlets, if yes how?
Yes, you can use the pubsub2 feature in Shindig to do this.  There is
an example gadget that demonstrates this is in the common container in
Shindig.
>
> Please guide me in above concerns, I tired searching the web but didn't get
> my answers.
>
> Thank you
> Kishan

[1] https://reviews.apache.org/r/14406/
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SHINDIG-1927
[3] https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/shindig/trunk/content/containers/
[4] http://opensocial.github.io/explorer/