Interportlet Communication

I came across multiple situations where the client was more interested in providing Interportlet communication. A portal which provides an overview of the data and then on click provides the full information.

Interportlet communication though looks more user friendly has many problems with it:
1. Slow as
- it has to communicate with the back office to get the information
- the page has to hit many back offices based on the no. of portlets displayed
2. Complex to maintain as the configuration(Edit) of the summary portlets does not remain same
3. Storage of the preferences selected on these summary portlets cannot be stored in one table unless they have similar configurations.

ATG Portal Layout

ATG Portal is pretty simple in defining the layouts. You can choose the layout from the existing one's or create a new one. The layouts are defined with a grid like structure. For example 80-20 layout means: A layout of 2 columns, one that occupies 80% of the space and the other that occupies only 20% of the space.

The templates jsps provided by ATG can be used to develop new Layouts.

Dependency Injection and ATG

Dependency Injection concept has been defined by ATG much earlier than this pattern came into the seen. ATG has a much clear and simple approach to implement the Dependency Injection.

Steps:
1. Create an ATG component
2. Include this component in another component wherever this component is needed.

So simple! Go ahead and use it!