Has anyone had any luck portalizing their Domino app(s) for Bea WebLogic’s portal? This is a fact finding mission, so any pointers are helpful.
Funny how IBM stresses the appeal of WebSphere is its open standards. It seems all of its Domino-centric portlets only work on WebSphere portal? How is that an open standard?
Subject: Welcome to the world of “IBM standards” (WAS: BEA WebLogic Portal)
Subject: depends what you mean by “portalizing” 
If you mean just showing your Domino apps in a pane in Bea, that shouldn’t be a
problem. If you want authenticated access, you need some sort of Single Sign
On (SSO) tool and AFAIK, none exist for Weblogic. If you want to use Domino
JSP tags to surface Domino data…I’ve found lots of quirks w/ the Domino JSP
tags when getting my a href=http://www.keysolutions.com/JBoss>Domino/JBoss
SSO tool] working. There are bugs in them. A lot of J2EE servers pool JSP
tag objects for better performance. Apparently, Websphere doesn’t. The Domino
JSP tags don’t properly reinitialize out of a pool. What this means is you’ll
get flaky behavior like duplicate values in tags, etc.
Subject: RE: depends what you mean by “portalizing”
Hey Ken!
Remember I am on a fact finding mission, so don’t let me give you the impression I am actually sitting here with my BEA WebLogic Portal trying any of this stuff. I do have my WebSphere setup at home though, studying for the cert.
Anyway, the WebSphere Portal server comes with all these cool, Domino specific portlets. Most popular of course are the collobaration portlets. IBM is obviously doing all it can to allow users to expose their Domino apps in WebSphere portal with a few clicks of a mouse. I assumed that I could just plop those .war files into another web application server and they would work, based on the fact that J2EE is an open standard framework. But, all of the documentation only mentions WebSphere. That has lead me to believe that the portlets are WebSphere specific. However, I am told that someone from IBM is going to do a demo at my current client and prove otherwise! That will be a good thing.
When you say that BEA should have no problem displaying my Domino app in a pane, is that based on that fact that my Domino app is accessed via a URL?
Thanks for the heads up on the Domino JSP tags. Have you thought of using the XML api with R6 instead? Or are we talking apples and oranges?
Nice to hear from you, Ken.
Subject: RE: depends what you mean by “portalizing”
I alerted Ken in July to the fact that the Domino JSP tags don’t work when tag caching is in use in a servlet container - JBoss was the one under discussion at that time. Servlet containers that implement tag caching/tag pooling also have configuration options to turn it off - because such tag caching is not required by the JSP spec.
Getting the Domino JSP tags to work with tag caching is adding a feature, not fixing a bug, and it is on my to-do list.
As to Ken’s statement that there are bugs in the tags, well, technically I must agree since I have some open SPRs. But none that I know of that are show stoppers - I sure would be interested to hear of any bugs Ken, or anyone else, might find.
To make your apps run in anyone’s portal server, you need to play by the portal rules - since your app’s screen real estate has been reduced to a cell in a table on the portal’s html page, you can’t generate any , , or html directives. All URLs to resources in your web app need to be sent through the portal server, all your javascript will need to be unique enough to not intrude on the other apps in the other table cells.
The Domino JSP tag library can do this for IBM’s Portal server, the technique it uses to integrate is just object oriented - you have to extend a class and let the Domino JSP tags know where to find it. There is no reason you couldn’t do it for WebLogic.
Hope that piques your interest!
Steve