Ajax Portal Connector for JSR-168 and WSRP

More and more companies have leveraged to power of portal servers to create highly personalized intranets and web applications. Portal servers provide many useful features, such as personalization, single sign-on, and integration with 3rd party portlets. However, the user experience is often plagued by long wait times, because every action results in a complete page refresh. To compare: desktop applications are more responsive and do not refresh the entire screen after a mouse-click. Add Ajax to a portal and you get similar benefits: no more screen refreshes, and much improved response times.

BEA IBM Oracle JBoss

Backbase Enterprise Ajax with the Portal Connector enables you to create JSR-168 compliant portlets that do not require your portal page to re-render all portlets after each operation and also offers over 250 Ajax widgets and functions that simplify the development of your “ajaxified” portlets.

The concept of the Portal Connector is that we want to avoid as many page refreshes as possible when interacting with a portlet. We’re using the WSRP protocol and JSR-168. To avoid page refreshes, we avoid rerunning the portlet class, because that would cause the entire portal page to refresh. So the main thing we do in an Ajax portlet is to dispatch to a view. When you need other functionality such as editing portlet preferences, you can define other JSR168 defined methods (like processAction) to take care of this.