[wsrp] Fewer factories?

[Andre Kramer <andre.kramer@eu.citrix.com>]

Title: [wsrp] Fewer factories?

At the last face-to-face meeting we took an action to investigate collapsing the new portlet factories and the 1.0 clonePortlet factory. My proposal is obviously the closet to the existing operation and could easily allow the old operation to be removed from the protocol (and just be supported as a compatibility API with minimal wrapping).

However, there are strong reasons not to do this. It's important to allow all the logical factories to be optional in 2.0 from the producer as well as the consumer point of view. This could mean that a producer would end up throwing exceptions if a consumer tried to use copyPortlet between two registrations when the producer only supported only the old clone / copy within a registration behaviour. Better to keep the old operation and avoid such exceptions.

Also, the new operation, with its bulk copy ability and the old single handle versions do serve separate common use cases and are simple enough in terms of protocol to both be also included separately at the protocol level, but that is my personal opinion.

We could in a future version, once copyPortlet is widely supported, remove clonePortlet from the protocol, possibly deprecating it first, but again I think even long term the gain would be questionable here. Removing a redundant operation nearly always requires more work, being a backwards incompatible change, then the benefits this would appear to gain.

Regards,

Andre