Re: Inter-Portlet communication, WebSphere Portal and JSR168

I didn't follow up   on the links you provided, and I haven't studied 
interprocess communication   between portlets, so at the risk of sounding 
utterly uninformed I'll admit that   I had the impression that calls to portlet 
methods were triggered by browser   requests, as opposed to being triggered by 
say an entry on a data queue, or a   JavaSpace.
     
    If multiple   instances of a portlet are running in different instances of 
an application   server, then how would you know which instance you might be 
trying to   communicate with?
     
    Nathan   Andelin
  

Joe Sam Shirah <jshirah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:  
    Hi Walden,

    Well, you asked for "preferred," which I also translated as "standard"
or "normal" thoughts on Portlet IPC, and those seem to be about it.  I agree
that IPC should be trivial because it's frequently needed in many areas.  I
haven't gone deep enough into JSR 286 to know if there's going to be a good
portlet IPC process there, but it won't help you now anyhow.

    I do have a possibly off the wall suggestion.  Caveat:  At this point I
haven't followed it up enough yet to know if it really makes sense:

    Around the 1998-2000 timeframe, I got pretty excited about JavaSpaces.
Then Sun wrapped it up in Jini, with a lot of licensing issues that made
Jini an also ran.  However, not too long ago, Jini, and JavaSpaces, was open
sourced under the Apache license.  I've been planning to check back into
JavaSpaces Real Soon Now, and possibly write some articles about it if I
feel it's more feasible now.

    Essentially, JavaSpaces is a service that provides a transient ( in
memory ) or persistant.object oriented file system.  After setup, the API
pretty much amounted to write, read, remove and notify.  So you counld have
a listener when some other process put something of interest.  Not too much
different in concept from JMS, but without a whole lot of frills.  Note that
it would amount to IPC for virtually anything.  As far as I know ( which may
be wrong, ) you don't have to do anything with Jini to use JavaSpaces,
although I think the Jini download is the only way to get JavaSpaces.  I
believe there are some other implementations of the spec, but I haven't
checked.

    The Jini downloads are at :

http://starterkit.jini.org/downloads/

    So, that's my suggestion of the day.  I think that would be a pretty
interesting thing to work on.  Please let the list know your decision; it
should be useful.  HTH,


                                                         Joe Sam

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