Should portlets/producers indicate that they push out persistent state?

[Richard Jacob <richard.jacob@de.ibm.com>]

I have a question regarding persistent state pushing to the Consumer.
This can either be the state in the RegistrationContext or in the
PortletContext.
Currently the Producer can push its state whenever it likes to, and the
Consumer requires to handle it accordingly (return it back, persist it).

Shouldn't we have metadate that indicates the Producer/Portlets preference
to push out state?
In that case the Consumer can choose to not use such a portlet.
I see two use cases for it:
1.) the Consumer can't/doesn't want to persist the data be it for
technical/resource reasons or legal/privacy reasons
2.) the Consumer "shares" the handles with another Consumer/Machine. We
discussed such scenarios when we discussed import/export.
From the Producer's perspective this is still the same Consumer (unless
some security mechanism says otherwise), so protocol-wise this is perfectly
legal.
However if the Producer chooses to push out persistent state, such
scenarios won't work unless the different "Consumers" sync themselves in
some manner.

So what I'm asking for is basically two things:
1.) add metadata to the ServiceDesc saying that the registrationContext
might contain state
2.) add metadata to the PortletDesc saying that the portlet intends to push
out state in the PortletContext

Mit freundlichen Gruessen / best regards,

        Richard Jacob
______________________________________________________
IBM Lab Boeblingen, Germany
Dept.8288, WebSphere Portal Server Development
WSRP Team Lead & Technical Lead
WSRP Standardization
Phone: ++49 7031 16-3469  -  Fax: ++49 7031 16-4888
Email: mailto:richard.jacob@de.ibm.com