Portlet Training
I’ve been in portlet training all of this week. Today is our last day. It has been an interesting experience. I’ve come to learn that the IBM consultants that were hired to help us get our portal implementation off the ground may have misinformed us.
Without any prior portal experience the consultants were hired to develop some new portlet applications using standard “best practices”. These were brand new, never before developed applications. Nothing major, but definitely visible and active. They wrote these portlets completely using Apache Struts, which I can understand, but after talking with our instructor the Struts support is for migrating applications. New applications are almost always developed using portal technologies instead of Struts. This bothers me a bit.
We’ll have to sit down at work and have a good discussion about the situation we are in. The consultants are gone and we have to support the existing portlets and figure out how we are going to develop new portlets. My head aches from thinking about it. Portlets are not too difficult, but there is a learning curve and it is tough to make decisions about how we should proceed without proper knowledge and experience. I’m crossing my fingers very tightly.