Special Considerations for Portlet Development

Special Considerations for Portlet Development

ICEfaces supports developing and deploying JSR 168 compliant portlets.

Standard portal and portlet development have their own set of design considerations that need to be kept in mind by the developer. Adding ICEfaces can significantly enhance the richness of your portlet interface and, through Ajax Push, can provide a means for seamlessly updating multiple portlets on a single page. However, in addition to the general design decisions discussed previously, there are some specific things to consider to ensure that your portlet development experience is successful. More details on these topics can be found in the Developing Portlets with ICEfaces section in the ICEfaces Developer's Guide.

While ICEfaces tests against and supports a number of the most popular portal containers, differences between implementations can still present incompatibilities. Check to see that the portal container you are using is supported or has been successfully used by somebody in the ICEfaces community.
Because ICEfaces is a JSF-based framework, there are some aspects of the Portlet API that are accessed differently than they would be in a plain portlet application. This is important if you are porting legacy portlets or applications to run with ICEfaces.
While it's possible to run ICEfaces portlets along with portlets that use other technologies or frameworks, the chances of incompatibilities can increase significantly. For best results, it is recommended to confine your portal application to a small, consistent set of technologies. The typical problem faced here is JavaScript conflicts because different frameworks use different libraries or different versions of the same library.
The benefits provided by ICEfaces for enriching the user interface can be reduced through certain design decisions. For example, while it is possible to navigate between different views in a portlet, it is often a better choice to provide a different user interface abstraction, like tab panels, to provide different views into the same application in a single page.