Embedding the portlet container into existing software

[Timo -Blazko- Boewing <li...@neveprise.net>]

Hello together,

Since quite some time now I am getting into Portal and Portlet
development. I am trying to extend an existing "portal" software
to handle JSR168 Portlets also and am trying to do so using the Pluto 
container. I have investigated the Pluto portal driver and tried around 
a bit.

It was a bit hard to learn from that portal implementation because it is 
   using factories and intefaces a lot, thus often the inner workings 
are not obvious at 1st sight, so I wished that the example portal is a 
bit simpler and not so "academic", cos otherwise I could have taken a 
look into Jetspeed2, exo, Cocoon etc. (although having done so also) :-)

Okay, this is not ment to be destructive critique cos I am thankful for 
what the Pluto team has done! However, perhaps in future the driver is a 
bit downgraded for purposes of reference.

So, my question is if anyone has yet tried to implement/integrate the 
Pluto PortletContainer into his/her custom software or has tried to 
implement a portal on his/her own. Looking at the Pluto Portal Driver 
Servlet, it seems that any fragments (portlet, page etc.) are rendered 
into the HttpServletResponse "directly". However, I would like to "pull" 
portlet fragments from within existing JSP pages, e.g. using (custom?) 
taglibs / ELs or so, just like for example <c:import /> does for any 
markup resource.

Is there any way to invoke a portlet rendering from the main JSP portal 
page? This is because I forward to a JSP in the end of my Servlet 
doGet()/doPost() methods where all other stuff is already done so far 
and I would hate to reimplement the entire core, I already downgraded 
from Struts to a single custom Servlet already. :-)

Sorry for this long writing, but I would be very glad if someone could 
point me a direction, cos from googling the web and reading much 
documents and a book on portal/portlet development, it was too hard to 
find info for the portal implementor's view, not the portlet developer.

If the answer is a RTFM (xyz), it is just fine because I may have missed 
something despite of it :-) Thank you!

-- 
greetings,                   |  /"\
                              |  \ /  ASCII-Ribbon-Campaign
Timo                         |   X     Against HTML Mail
                              |  / \