Daniele Vistalli's Blog

Did you notice that on Greenhouse there's a "Mixed" quickr environment that blends both Quickr Services for J2EE and Quickr Services fro Domino ?

If not, then go and take a look at this smart implementation of cohexistence between domino style places and portal style places.

The implementation is smart and you get:

A single list of places, the places lists shows you areas from both the J2EE/Portal and the Domino server




A single "new place" experience, from the list you can see that both J2EE places based on composite applications and Domino places based on Domino placeTypes are available (for instance qTemplates from SNAPPS)



Why this could be interesting/important ?

I understand this is an experiment at IBM but it could be good for customers with large deployments (maybe some Quickplace legacy) who wants to transition / get the best of both worlds.

Can somebody at IBM explain if it's available to for normal users or going to be released ?

Technically from what I can see the place list and the creation portlet (in Quickr J2EE) have been extended to mix the local Quickr J2EE registry of places and placetypes with those coming from a domino server (is this using REST feeds ?).

Once you create a domino place i expect the portlet to use XML commands to do the place creation on domino and register it in the global registry as:

http://greenhouse.lotus.com/quickr_services_for_LD/

I expect the quickr_services_for_LD to be a sort of reverse proxy rule pointing to the root of the domino quickr server, this allows the domino server to do the place name resolution and redirect the user's browser to

http://greenhouse.lotus.com/QuickPlace/

At this point even the /QuikPlace/ url is a reverse proxy rule pointing to the same quickr server.

The trick is complet and transparent to the user.


What's missing ?

The implementation of the trick is pretty interesting, at this point here's what's missing:
1.        Federated search: the search portlet only returns results from the J2EE side of quickr
2.        "Favurites" for domino places: only J2EE places can be marked as favourites to appear in the "Favorites" list
3.        Centralized place management: the Manage places button only works about J2EE places. To delete a Domino place you must go trough the "customize -> basics -> delete place" process.

However things will ends up (public release Vs internal experiment) this is a smart sample of how Domino and Portal can work together transparently and bring more service to end users.

Great work "Greenhouse team" !!!

Note:
I didn't notice this at first, my friend Enzo Stanzione told me, so I decided it could be of interest to somebody else. Thanks Enzo.