I've spent the last few weeks in a new larval stage again. This time I've the been studying the alphabet soup that surrounds web portlets and the JSR168 spec. I'm not talking about learning to make portlets... that's easy... I'm talking about the best way to make portlets.
The fastest way to get working with portlets is to start by creating JSP pages and balling them up into portlets. You end up with function fast. But, if you plan on doing that, why not just go with a PHP based site? About all that JSP will get you in this case would be some props at cocktail parties where you can get an easy 'wow' by tossing around the word Java a few times.
We want MVC and we want to enforce it. So I've decided on velocity for page design. With velocity I can give page designers the ability to work with active page content and remove the possibility that some slack-jaw might muck up my code-base by slapping in some ill concieved SQL. It also means that view policy is utterly divorced from controller mechanisms.
