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List:       xml-cocoon-dev
Subject:    RE: Introduction
From:       "Carsten Ziegeler" <cziegeler () apache ! org>
Date:       2004-11-09 3:16:33
Message-ID: 200411090315.iA93FIqp009624 () mailer ! progressive-comp ! com
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Ralph Goers wrote: 
> 
> Reinhard Poetz wrote:
> 
> > Thank you, very interesting reading!
> >
> > BTW, could you tell about how you use the Cocoon Portal? 
> ("... in ways 
> > that were probably never thought of by its authors ..." makes me 
> > curious ;-)
> >
> Sure. It turns out that the portal (if you ignore the JSR-168 
> support) is really a standard way of performing the site 
> navigation.  It fairly efficiently allows you to aggregate 
> several pipelines into a single view (which is why it is a 
> portal). Even if you don't want the look and feel of a portal 
> you can still use the Portal as your site navigation framework.
> 
> Now we have an application that can have varying numbers of 
> tabs based upon what MBeans are available with data to report 
> and the user's authority to view the data.  Since the portal 
> definition and layout files are all retrieved via a pipeline 
> it is easy to dynamically generate the XML configuration 
> specifically for the user when they log in. This site doesn't 
> look at all like a portal. It has navigation across the top 
> and most of the pages contain two portlets. The left one 
> contains a list of items that, when an item is selected, 
> cause the data associated with that item to appear in the 
> portlet on the right side of the screen.
> 
> In addition we have another product that was implemented with 
> a commercial vendor's Portal product. Unfortunately, most 
> Portals are not designed to work in an ASP environment (i.e. 
> one webapp with potentially hundreds of site layouts).  
> Again, because the configuration uses a pipeline we can use a 
> a different configuration for each customer.  The beauty is, 
> many of these customers don't really want a portal. But the 
> Cocoon Portal doesn't have to look or behave like one.If 
> everyone anonymously logs in it can just look like a regular 
> website. But because it also supports JSR 168 Portlets, you 
> get the best of both worlds.
> 
> Also, with the addition of the Page Label support I added the 
> site behaves more or less like a "regular" web site.  You can 
> be in the middle of a flow and switch to another tab. When 
> you come back you can resume the flow right where you left off.
> 
> Basically, I'm considering using the Portal for all our 
> products.  It will make integrating them fairly easy.
> 
Believe it or not :) we thought of such use cases when we
designed the portal ;) the portal gives a nice framework
for structured web pages and we are using it for "usual" web
sites as well.

Carsten

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