Spring Webflow , Portlets and Ajax

[pbsr]

We currently have a fairly complex spring webflow+spring mvc non-ajax application which business wants to modify and add quite a bit of dynamic functionality, in other words ajaxify it.One of the key requirement is to navigate between states without a whole page refresh.

I have been experimenting with different options available , however unable to get a proper working version. My main issue is I am unable to perform partial rendering during state transitions.

Have any of you tried spring webflow based ajax application in portlet environment(Websphere 7.0.0.2). Can you please suggest , combination of frameworks to use to get the most flexibility.

Thanks is advance.

[MikeSt]

I had some success with SWF 2.3.0, and PrimeFaces 1.x on WebSphere Portal 6. To get this working, a fair amount of SWF extensions had to be developed. Within this environment, JSF 2.x could not be run, we had to resort to JSF 1.2. Due to SWF 2.3.0, no other portlet bridge had to be injected into the stack. Now, people claim that on the grounds of SWF 2.3.0, PrimeFaces 3.x and JSF 2.x things should've become more feasible, but I doubt it as long as the JSF 2 compatible bridge problem has not been solved.

So it seems you have to experiment along these lines, in particular by trying the bridge from portletfaces.org.

Here is some further reading:

https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SWF-1415
http://forum.springsource.org/showth...elopment/page2

[Rossen Stoyanchev]

When using Spring Web Flow you rely on it to respond to portlet requests, invoke the JSF lifecycle, and to preserve state for example between the action and the render phase. That is also roughly what a Portlet bridge for JSF needs to do in order for a JSF application to remain unaware of the portlet environment. Hence the two overlap and in a Spring Web Flow application it serves the role of the bridge. That said as Mike pointed out currently you can't use JSF 2 in a portlet environment with Spring Web Flow.