Comments by Carsten Leue in blue

Discussion Areas

• SOAP encoding

How do we return marked up content in a soap response?  efficiently?
Should we support an escape hatch so the getContent request can be made via HTTP post?
Are there any performance numbers we would like the implementation team to generate for us to better understand how to most efficiently use SOAP?

Make sure that the SOAP flavour used is compatible to implementations other that J2EE (e.g. .NET)

• WSIA

I am assuming for the moment that the areas where WSIA/WSRP overlap will NOT be discussed in this subcommittee -- the pupose of this ietm is to define explicitly what is exlcuded.  From my notes taken at last week's meeting this would seem to be:

• activation/deactivation
• version detection/expression

• WSRP interfaces
• Instance lifecycle
• create -- What are the things we want a producer to be able to do when a portlet instance is created?  What information is needed from the consumer to do this?  Who controls/creates the instance handle (portlet id)? Is the handle persistent? Is the handle cloneable? Can one (server side) handle be used by multiple clients concurrently?
• destroy -- What are the things we want a producer to be able to do when a portlet instance is deleted? Can a (persistent) handle expire?
• other operations -- Are there other operations we should consider?  Do we need to define a copy method?  How about a publish method (when a portal is being moved from a dev to a stage to a production environment)?  Others?
• Content generation

What information does the producer need to generate content?  How does the producer know what content to produce?  How does the producer return content?  How does it indicate content type and encoding?  Should we start with an assumption that most renderers adhere to the HTTP get/post response model and try and map from that to SOAP?

• Actions

What are actions?  How are they different from events? Why are they needed?  Do actions produce content?  Can action handlers cause other actions or events to be triggered? If so how does a portlet instance discover and identify targets? How can actions be efficiently implemented? How are actions encoded in the markup?

• Events/messaging

What are events?  How are they different from actions?  Why are they needed?  Do events produce content? Can event handlers cause other actions or events to be triggered?  If so how does a portlet instance discover and identify targets?  Are events a general purpose concept that should utilize a general purpose messaging system or is the messaging system defined and managed by the consumer/Portal? How can events be efficiently implemented? Do we need events in WSRP or can we live with actions for the sake of ease-of-use and ease-of-implementation?

• Session Management/Portlet Grouping

What are session for; maintaining state within a single portlet and/or maintaining between a set of (cooperating) portlets?  If the later, do we need a notion of a Portal application/group/provider int he API?  If we do, what is its role (from an API/abstraction perspective)?  How are sessions established?  By the consumer? By the consumer requesting a session? Or willy-nilly in responses by the producer (this is the http/servlet model)?  Who can invalidate a session?  How does each side get notified? How does a consumer react when told a session has become invalid?  How does the portlet/producer?

• Request data

What information should the portal pass to the portlets when requesting markup? Will all data need to be published with each request or will it be possible to initialize the service once and send only differential data in the subsequent calls?

• Order of method invocation, client, & server contracts

I don't have any specific questions to throw out here -- to a certain extent this probably falls out of answering the questions in the other topic areas.  Anyone have any ideas?

• URL Rewriting

Does the consumer or a producer do URL rewriting?  (Note: If the producer then URL rewriting is used loosely here as no rewriting might take place if URLs are written correctly in the first place)  What are the factors we need to consider to make a decision?  Performance? Ease of use?  Correctness? Decoupling between producer and consumer? Is there a way to support both styles transparently to the producer? How do we support hardcoded/(absolute?) URLs?

• namespace encoding

How does the portal/portlets distinguish portlet instance form/request parameters such that each instance can (safely) locate its parameters in the request?  If namespace/prefixing is used, what is a name composed of? Does the portal expose only a portlet instance's parameters to the instance or does the instance "see" other request parameters?  If parameters are isolated how is this implemented? Can the URL rewriting principle be used to rewrite namespace prefixes? Performance and ease of use need to be considered. It would be nice if WSRP would allow for services with static content (so namespace rewriting would be done on the client).

• Remote portlet vs remote portlet container

Does the API we are designing generally require a producer side runtime (portlet container) to make it convenient for content developers?  If so, should WSRP define a least one more API, a simple API, that removes/hides the extra complexity of the full version?