There are a few other posts (search forums with "ajax portlet") which mention how the Blueprints Ajax components do not work if used in a portlet (which I verified rather quickly.) Are there still plans for this?
I suppose more importantly is, if I develop my own ajax component, what are the hurdles I will face in a portal environment? Thanks.
Jeff,
Unfortunately there isn't any progress on the AJAX Blueprint components working in JSR-168 JSF portlets. The main problem lies in addressing. The client javascript piece needs to know where to connect to on the back end. The answer seems easy, the portlet's JSF backing beans. This is were the current portal server implementations break the common pattern of doing this. As I understand it, the portlet containers strip off "GET" parameters when the URLs are passed to the portlets so the backend AJAX frameworks can't get needed information from the asynchronous call. This is a very high-level overview of the problem as I understand it.
You can however, try some manual methods for doing AJAX and portlets. I'm not sure how the JSF-Portlet adapter (the software that navigates the portlet lifecycle and the JSF lifecycle) will trip you up but it's worth a try.
Greg Ziebold, a Sun Portal Server engineer recently wrote a great article on best practices titled, "Best Practices for Applying AJAX to JSR 168 Portlets" found here http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/portalserver/reference/techart/ajax-portlets .html.
Hope that helps!
-David
