Considering Portlet Architecture for Project - Is this reasonable?

I have a new application to write, and the timeline is tight - I'd like to overview the requirements and why I'm considering Portlets over Servlets; however, I have no experience with Portlets and therefore would like someone who is familiar to let me know if I'm missing anything, or if I'm doomed to spend too much time learning the new technology.

Project Requirements Overview :

I need to build a system that allows clients to build simple websites through our own UI (the building tools must be completely customizable as I'm work开发者_Go百科ing with a talented design team) - think of a "easy as 1,2,3" page builder where you specify templates, content, etc. Of course we also need to be prepared to handle special requests where clients or internal people can tweak the pages. Also, we will offer special components and pages that interact with our back-end system.

• Each client website must be linked to a separate domain
• I should be able to create multiple interfaces for editing pages and content - so that more advanced users are able to make more advanced changes
• A web designer without programming skills can create templates for the look and feel of the sites - while developers can then add the dynamic functionality

Why I'm Considering Portlets :

As I drew up extravagant designs, the one thing I keep coming to is realizing, this is going to be difficult to deliver quickly, and the quicker I deliver, the more likely I am to have coded myself into a corner. So I wanted to be able to manage aspects of the application separately, but just don't have the time to do so (since it would be entirely on me to create that system). Also, in order to keep on time, I will need to delegate parts of the project carefully, if its totally home built I need to be REALLY careful what I delegate. Then I found out about "liferay" which lead me to investigate portlets.

So basically the Portlet architecture doesn't seem to prohibit anything I need, plus we can add all our special needs as hot deployed portlets - pages can be created as HTML and enhanced with Velocity - and if some requirements change, there is a standard I've adhered to and therefore can make changes to configuration. I may even want to use liferay as it does nearly everything I want (although I would need to provide a much simpler page editing interface).

Conclusion :

So that's the project requirements and why I'm thinking about going for portlets, but I'm not sure if it's really a fit, or if it just SEEMS like a fit, does it seem reasonable to those of your familiar with Portlets?

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There's nothing you mention that speaks against adopting portlets - quite contrary: Sounds like a good fit.

The only tricky part might be that you don't have any portlet experience, so estimation will likely be a bit off while you learn this environment, but this would apply to every environment that you don't know yet. Compared with a servlet approach you'll start with quite a lot of functionality out of the box, so it sounds completely reasonable. And you don't even need to maintain this functionality yourself...

If you can you might want to consider getting trained in the environment of your choice to get to speed quickly. (You tagged the question with "liferay" and Liferay offers training all over the world - Disclaimer: I work for Liferay)