13.1. Portal

Our modest Toast Back End has already demonstrated some of the value of OSGi on servers—we are able to reuse bundles on the client and server, and composing collections of servlets is straightforward. In the larger context, the benefits of OSGi seen on desktops are at play on servers. In this chapter we explore some of these and create a simple extensible web UI portal using techniques similar to those used in other scenarios.

In the Toast context we have a rich client UI. To create a similarly rich server UI would require significant effort and the use of technology such as the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). Here, we will create a simple portal that can be dynamically extended with new actions. For the most part we focus on the portal extensibility mechanisms and leave aside the details of web design and compelling workflows. Figure 13-1 shows a screen shot of the portal and the list of vehicles being managed.