Portlets and legacy application

At work we have both a legacy web app (a decade or so) as well as a new web application (< 6 months), both developed in Java. At the moment, both are running on different versions of JBoss AS (legacy app is currently using Spring 2, if I'm not mistaken, newer app built on Seam 2).

We're looking to create a section where users can view relevant information from both sources in the form of portlets (as well as potentially other compatible portlets).

I've never used portlets before and was wondering what technologies I should be looking at开发者_开发技巧 and how I should approach this task?

Is it possible to integrate the host portlet section in the first application or would we need a new deployment?

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I've just gone through a portal selection process where I work and we've found several ways to approach this-

You can purchase a high-end portal product such as WebSphere Portal Server or Oracle's portal product (whatever it's called this week), you can go Liferay community or Enterprise (the enterprise version comes with support and gets new features earlier than community), or you can go purely opensource with Apache Pluto. All of those will give you real, JSR compliant, portlet containers. If you decide to go that route (as apposed to using apache tiles to aggregate at the glass and avoid the hassle of a portal or going to a non-portal technology such as Adobe Flex & Mosaic) you then get to choose how you access the legacy applications:

1. Using the portlet-servlet bridge, if your portal server has one;

2. Try and link the truly legacy applications with an IFrame portlet.

3. Re-implement the user interface functionality (you were using the MVC(s) pattern, right?) as portlets.

I'd guess that the older application that you mentioned is probably not designed for the UI to be replaced and you'd be best served using options 1 or 2, but I can't say for sure without seeing the app itself.

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I think you may also want to look at using a portal bridge implementation.

Check out:

• http://portals.apache.org/bridges/
• http://myfaces.apache.org/portlet-bridge/index.html (for JSF)