UNICON Warlock PortletsA.K.A. toro-portlets

Andrew WillsJA-SIG 2007 Summer Conference, Denver

Tuesday June 26th, 2007

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1. Introduction & History

2. Deployment

3. Demos

4. About Warlock

Introduction & History

Introduction

• The Warlock Portlets are a collection of JSR-168

Portlets developed by UNICON for its Academus

Portal product

• “Warlock” is the name for a home-grown MVC &

Rendering framework used by these portlets

• UNICON has released its Academus technology into

open source

• The portlets based on Warlock are available as toro-

portlets

History of Warlock Portlets

• Academus Portal 1.5, March 2005

– Based on uPortal 2.3

– Warlock Introduced

– Briefcase Portlet

• Academus Portal 2.0, October 2005 (EDUCAUSE)

– Based on uPortal 2.4.2

– Notification Portlet

– Permissions Portlet

– Gateway (SSO) Portlet

– Blogging Portlet

– WCM Portlet

Warlock Present & Future

• Academus Portal 2.1, March 2007

– Based on uPortal 2.5.3

• Open Toro, Q2 2007

– Targets uPortal 2.6

– Includes several components

• toro-portlets

• toro-channels

• toro-ipaq

• toro-sdk

• toro-resource-pool

toro-portlets on the Web

• Project Home Page

http://code.google.com/p/toro-portlets

• GoogleGroups Discussion

http://groups.google.com/group/toro-projects

• Installation Instructions

http://code.google.com/p/toro-portlets/wiki/Deployment_Instructions

Makeup of toro-portlets

toro-portlets is composed of several modules:

• academus-api (portal-to-portlet communication)

• academus-apps (portlet implementations)

• alchemist (smaller utilities)

• civis (groups & group memberships API)

• demitrius (file system like structures API)

• mercury (messaging API)

• warlock (MVC & Rendering)

Deployment

toro-portlets Deployment

Covered in greater detail at this address:

http://code.google.com/p/toro-portlets/wiki/Deployment_Instructions

Prerequisites:

• JDK 5 or later

• JSR-168 compliant portlet container (uPortal)

• Subversion

• Jakarta Ant

toro-portlets Deployment (Cont.)

Deployment Summary

1. Download toro-portlets from Source

2. Configure toro-portlets properties

3. Compile & Deploy

4. Create the database schema

5. Configure your portal

1. Download toro-portlets

• Use Subversion to obtain toro-portlets source

code from GoogleCode

• You will need the academus-api component and

the academus-apps component

svn checkout http://toro-portlets.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/academus-api/

svn checkout http://toro-portlets.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/academus-apps/

2. Configure toro-portlets

• academus-api/build.properties

– tomcat.home (location of Tomcat installation)

• academus-apps/build.properties (15 total settings)

– tomcat.home (as above)

– portal.name (name of portal webapp)

– ACADEMUS_WEBAPP_NAME (same as portal.name)

– HOSTNAME

– WEBSERVER_HOST_NAME (same as HOSTNAME)

– WEBSERVER_FULLHTTPPORT

• academus-apps/properties/rdbm.properties

– Database connection settings

– Hibernate dialect

3. Compile & Deploy

• From academus-api:

> ant deploy

• From academus-apps*:

> ant deploy

* uPorta-specific logic

4. Create Database Schema

• You must place a copy of your database

driver JAR in the academus-apps/lib/

directory

• From academus-apps:

> ant db

WARNING: Invoking the ‘db’ target again will

reset the toro-portlets database!

5. Configure Your Portal

• You must support the user.login.id attribute

• Add the uPortalAcademusApiImpl.jar archive the WEB-INF/lib/ directory in uPortal

• Add the following to properties/services.xml

• You must re-deploy your portal for the changes to take effect

<!-- Registers a uPortal-based Academus Facade for the Academus Portlets -->

<service>

<name>uPortal Academus Facade</name>

<class>net.unicon.academus.api.uportal.UPortalAcademusFacade</class>

<method type="static">register</method>

</service>

Demos

Briefcase Portlet

Notifications Portlet

Warlock Overview

What is Warlock?

• “Warlock is a framework for Java applications

developed by, designed for, and employed by

UNICON”

• Warlock has two essential responsibilities

– State Machine (MVC)

– Templating (Rendering Markup)

Why Warlock?

• In essence, Warlock was created because the Academus team was experiencing a Warlock-shaped gap in their tool belt

• Most web development frameworks couldn’t handle portlets

• Spring Portlet MVC wasn’t seriously considered because

– It was a sandbox project (no GA release)

– Early examples weren’t impressive

Goals of Warlock

We aimed to…

1. Empower the UE team to take ownership of the UI

2. Create an environment where Java & UE professionals could collaborate each in their own time

3. Promote application states & actions to first-class objects (MVC)

4. Break out of the 1:1 ratio of applications screens to XSL files

5. Model user input in a richer set of types (not Map<String,String[]>)

6. Discover inconsistencies between UI & Controller data sets at the earliest possible time

Developing in Warlock

• First you…

1. “Skin” your Warlock with a master XSLT (a.k.a

Modulo)

• And then you…

1. Prepare Screen Definition Files (team UE)

2. Develop IAction implementations

3. Develop IStateQuery implementations

4. Bootstrap a StateMachine in a class that extends

WarlockPortlet

Screen Definition Files

• These files declare the contents of a screen in an XML syntax

• Warlock consumes some elements to create IScreen objects

• Everything else is consumed by the master XSLT (Modulo)

• Use XPath expressions ad-hoc within {} delimiters to render application data from an IStateQuery implementation

Example Screen Definition

<screen handle="welcome">

<layout> <section type=“header”><h2>Welcome to your Briefcase</h2></section> <section type=“pagetext”> <choice-collection handle=“content”> <choice handle=“goLocation” min-selections=“0” max-selections=“1”> <ul class=“no-bullet no-pad”> <call-template handle=“drive” select=“/state/briefcase/drive”/> </ul> </choice> </choice-collection> </section> </layout> <template> <li><link><action handle=“nav” impl=“net.unicon.academus.briefcase.GoToFolderAction”> <label><value-of select=“label”/></label> <option handle=“{@handle}” complement-type=“net.unicon.penelope.TypeNone”/> </action></link></li> </template>

</screen>

Was Warlock a Success?

• If you ask me…

“Yes – we accomplished our goals.”

• But that doesn’t mean Warlock is the right

choice for your project, because:

– Academus development employed a separate,

dedicated team of UE professionals

– We hit our targets for flexibility, but didn’t make

accessibility enough of a priority

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Questions?