It will soon be four years since the Portlet 1.0 specification has been adopted under the Sun JCP ( JSR-168 ). Since, most actors of the small world of Java portals adopted this normalization: the reuse of multi-portal portlets JSR-168 standard is now a reality.
But in four years, these portals have matured and everyone has more or less enriched the standard mechanisms. It is time to set a new common ground and to standardize the necessary changes to the platform. It is the goal of JSR-286 , initiated in late 2005 and now approaching its conclusion. Indeed the first revision "Public Review" of the portlet specification 2.0 has just been published two weeks ago, we can reasonably expect the final version a few weeks.
We already know that this specification will ensure a retro-compatible portlets for JSR-168 and a consistency with the standard WSRP 2.0 defined by OASIS. The scope of this new portlet specification 2.0 is already quite clear and covers most of the limitations of the previous version:
- introduction of an event model for inter-portlet communication (including integrated remote portlets through WSRP, the serialization of messages will be based on JAXB 2.0 , which is also more and more weight)
- opportunity to serve non-HTML resources remaining within the context "portlet" (download binary files, XML fragments to AJAX requests)
- Adding portlet filters modeled on servlet filters
- standardization of a cache system advanced (span public / private, conditional invalidation)
I bet that publishers are in the starting blocks and that some are already in advanced stages of implementation to integrate these innovations. We will particularly look at Liferay was one of the first to respect the previous specification (since March 2004 and version 2.1). Soon a version 5.0 JSR-286?
