Re: deploying portlets in a different server

Nathaniel A. Johnson wrote:
> Elliot Metsger wrote:
> 
>> Nathaniel A. Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> Is there a way to deploy portlets, bundled in WARs, into another tomcat
>>> server (that does not contain a portlet container) so load can be
>>> distributed a bit?  
>>
>>
>> If it were me I would set up a cluster of Apache HTTP servers and put 
>> a load balancer in front of them.  The http servers could be 
>> configured with mod_jk to loadbalance to backend Tomcat servers.
> 
> 
> That's exactly how we cluster our portal right now.  The problem is that 
> around here we have a lot of other applications that are not a part of 
> the portal, and can not be deployed inside of the portal for various 
> reason, but would like to present themselves inside the portal.  We 
> currently use iframes for these applications, and would like to provide 
> better integration.  This is why I was asking if you could deploy 
> portlets in different application servers.  Maybe WSRP is our best 
> option outside of the iframe world.

WSRP is the probably the best option as far as exposing JSR-168 portlets 
to a remote portal.  If your applications aren't JSR-168 portlets, I'm 
not sure how well the Apache WSRP implementation would work for you, but 
it's certainly possible to roll your own WSRP implementation to meet 
your local needs (there are four WSRP interfaces to implement - I think 
that two of them are optional, depending on what you're trying to do).

Portal vendors of course provide the ability to proxy or pull in content 
via iframes.  uPortal is one portal implementation that I am aware of 
which will actually proxy the content of a remote application instead of 
just re-displaying the content inside of an IFrame.  So depending on 
your portal application you may have a "webproxy" option as well as an 
Iframe option.

Hope this helps - sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on what 
you need/want.

Elliot