[Springframework-developer] Support for state/controller chaining in Portlets? (not quite webflow)

[Tim K. <tim...@vi...>]

Hi everyone,

I'm just throwing this out here to see what other people have to say.  I can
see from the list that there are a few developers actively working on portal
solutions using Spring MVC.  We are starting on our first project using this
as well, and one of the issues I'm trying to figure out now is the matter of
maintaining state in a portlet.  

In a typical CRUD example, if we have a portlet to display, edit and maange
information about a certain object, like a Book. We'd have view, edit and
delete functionality for example. 

In a typical non-portlet webapp, we could easily split those up across
different servlets for fine-grained areas of responsibility.  

But it's not as simple with portlets, because there are limitations on what
can be done, and essentially, all requests would need to go thru a single
portlet configuration.  

So, it no longer become sufficient to configure a simple portlet controller
for a portlet.  There needs to be a way to maintain state and to delegate
the request/response process to different types of controllers depending on
the state.  Like a View page would need to go thru a derivation of
BaseCommandController, an Edit page would go thru SimpleFormController. 

And not to mention adding yet another dimension when considering portlet
modes as well!

This article at IBM Developerworks pretty much covers the same issue I am
bringing up:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0312_ha
nis/hanis1.html

I did look at Spring's WebFlow a few days ago to see if it could address our
issue, but in the Webflow FAQ, it pretty much states that WebFlow should not
be used in cases where the user will be using back-button, or indeterminate
actions not within a strict flow.  

So that kinda leaves me back at square one.  After some discussion with my
co-worker, I would imagine that this is a common problem for any Spring
portlet developer creating more than just simple portlet functionality.  And
that as Spring portlet support matures, this will be a more common issue for
everyone.  Hence this email to the list.  

I'm now wondering how some of you have addressed this problem, and whether
there is a need for Spring's portlet support, to be in Spring 1.3 to include
some way to configure and facilitate a state process, maybe even based on
WebFlow's state machine - although I have only given WebFlow's state
functionality a brief look.

Thanks in advance,

-tim