A "Portlet-Like" java technolgy for a Web app

Question

Hi, Do you know a technology which can provide me a portlet-like interface?

But I do not want to use JSR 168/268 portlet specifications and a portlet container. The reason is: My web app is a product which can be installed on the client's server (it can be weblogic/websphere/tomcat). Packing the portlets container along with my application to be installed on clients web server is just too much.

Besides, there are a lot of features this technology offers which I don't need. Actually, all I need is the porlets look and feel (dragable and customizable windows,adding and removing windows and so on).

I know there is also the possibility to do it with client technology (like jquery) and that is cool, but I would like to know if there is any kind of java technology out there which will also give me that.

So, if you know something like a struts or a spring-mvc component library which does this job or maybe a third party product, I would like to know.

If you think my whole approach is wrong I would also like to know that.

Answer 1

Take a look at gwtportlets. From their site;

GWT Portlets is a free open source web framework for building GWT (Google Web Toolkit) applications. It defines a very simple & productive, yet powerful programming model to build good looking, modular GWT applications.

The programming model is somewhat similar to writing JSR168 portlets for a portal server (Liferay, JBoss Portal etc.). The "portal" is your application built using the GWT Portlets framework as a library. Application functionality is developed as loosely coupled Portlets each with an optional server side DataProvider.

Take a look at the demo here

Answer 2

Another suggestion would be JSF 2.0 which provide AJAX support for updating part of the HTML-page out of the box.

Have a look at this series to get an idea of the possibilities:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jsf2fu1/index.html