Forum OpenACS Development: writing portlets

1: writing portlets

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 10/10/01 11:00 AM

Hi,
I am playing with portals and wanted to write a portlet.
In OACS 3x you would go to /portals/admin and could write adp code and
test it.
I can't find that in OACS4. Is it that I am not seeing it or is not
there?

I tried to use the bboard data source. so went to add new element,
typed name, description, chose the appropiate datasource and clicked
add.

If I go to /portals, nothing is shown.

The documentation doesn't seem to have any explanations on how to do
it.

cheers

2: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Vinod Kurup on 10/10/01 03:16 PM

Hi Rafael,

I don't know too much about the inner workings of the portals yet, but I found a few minor errors in portals, subsites, and bboard_portlets which were conspiring to keep your portal/index.tcl page blank. I've fixed them in CVS. It seems to me that portals is missing a lot of UI pieces, but I haven't dug much deeper than that.

3: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Roger Williams on 10/10/01 05:08 PM

Hello Rafael:

I got the portal application to work feebly after reading the code and finding out that the default connector needs to have some stupid checkbox set in order to create the default portal.

There is a remaining permissions problem that I have not yet resolved where a non-admin userid cannot display the portal. There are other modules where special handling is necessary where non-default permissions must be set on data (not just on application instances). This is harder since there is no selection screen to specify this data individually.

Note that I am working with ACS4Tcl.

Regards..

4: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 10/10/01 06:26 PM

The portals package is being heavily rewritten as part of the dotLRN project. It's great that Vinod and others are hacking in fixes to the existing portal package but beyond getting it up, running, and minimally usable we probably shouldn't put much energy into it. It's somewhat brain-damaged as I think folks are figuring out.

The new portals package will make use of the new site contract paradigm to define the relationship between the portal "window manager" and the elements it can display. Should be much more flexible and "portlets" should be usable in a wider set of contexts, too.

Beyond that I just know that Ben et al are very busy and other than a couple of e-mails discussing design I'm out of the loop. They're located in NYC so lost a couple of weeks of productivity in September, which means they're tight up against deadlines so have been working less openly (without much feedback, in other words) than would be true if September hadn't been such a freaky month.

5: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 10/10/01 09:26 PM

We at OpenForce are currently working on a complete rewrite of portal
for the dotLRN project. It will use the "contract" paradgm among many, many other improvements.

Look for a public release of the new portal package sometime in December. That's all I can say in the way of a timeline for now.

6: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Kevin Crosbie on 02/05/02 12:14 PM

I was just wondering if you could tell me what stage the Portal package is at now.

I downloaded a nightly tarball last week, and I don't seem to be able to create my own datasources.

Is this functionality due soon or am I missing something and it's already there.

Cheers,

Kevin

7: Response to writing portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/05/02 05:40 PM

I highly recommend staying as far away from the current OpenACS 4 portal package as possible (it's a direct port of the ACS 4 classic portal package).

The new one written by Open Force is much better - I'm using it on a dotLRN package I'm writing. It's not been released yet but Open Force intends to in a matter of weeks.

It allows you to use templates for portlets rather than straight Tcl, supports theming and multiple styles, etc. It's looking good and is close to being finished.