Mobile Portlet for Mobile JSF Kit provides a prototype solution for developing the JSF portlet, using the MobileFaces library on the Apache JetSpeed portal server.

With the growth of the mobile content industry, more and more mobile portal servers provide service for mobile users. To adapt the portlets to both web and mobile portals, you can develop JSF portlets using MobileFaces, which can generate portlet fragments for different end devices.

Portlet with MobileFaces

In the mobile context, portals are sometimes oversized. Most mobile devices have a small screen, which is not suitable for displaying a portal page with a lot of content. In practice, mobile portals just aggregate the links, not the mobile applications, on the portal page. These links give direct access to the application.

The solution for mobile portlets is to adapt mobile JSF applications to both web portals and mobile devices.

Using bridge libraries, the mobile JSF application can run as both a portlet and a servlet:

• Web users access the application from the portal. The portal server will render the application as a portlet.      
• Mobile users access the mobile portal and then link directly to the application as a servlet. 

Mobile JSF can adapt markup languages, media resources and client scripts to different end devices on the application side. When functioning as a portlet, the application uses the layout of a portal. When functioning as a servlet, the application renders the layout using MobileFaces.

New solution

By Daning Yang & Peter Yeung

Previous versions of Mobile Portlet for Mobile JSF Kit