Sharing a Struts application among portlets

Question

I've written Struts applications before, but I'm new to portlets. I've read that there are two general approaches to portlet UI design. The first is when the user clicks on something in one portlet and a page of results or details displays in another portlet. In other words, "programmatic messaging provides for a particular user interface model, allowing an application to be delivered as a set of communicating portlets." The second approach is to do a wizard of pages within one portlet. "In contrast to the multiple portlet application user-interface model, the other dominant application UI style involves a single portlet that transitions through multiple 'screens'. This 'wizard' style of application interface can be complex to build without some sort of application framework. A popular framework for creating multiple screen Web applications, based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, is Struts."
My customer wants the application I'm to write to be integrated in their existing Oracle portal (10g but has to be backwards compatible with 9i). In a non-portlet Struts app, the requirements are pretty straight forward. I need a text input with a search button, about 10 navigation links and a label indicating to the user whether they are browsing or managing along with a dropdown that lets them toggle between browsing and managing and updates the label indicating their current mode. Those three areas (search, navigation, and mode toggle) will display on the left side of the page. The results of the search and the results of clicking on a navigation link should display on the right side of the page and the navigation link results will need to be in wizard form (fill out some fields and click Next, fill out some more fields and click Save). When a user changes their mode on the left side of the screen, the area containing the search results or navigation wizards on the right side of the screen will be updated to include some additional information. The twist (given that I've never written a portlet before and don't know if this is possible) is that the search should be in its own portlet, the navigation links and mode toggle should be in their own portlet and the area where the results of the search or navigation wizard pages display should be its own portlet.
In non-portlet Struts land, the search, navigation, mode toggle, and results would all be part of the same Struts app. Can I write one Struts app and refer to the appropriate pages within that one Struts app for each of my portlets, in essence sharing a Struts app between multiple portlets? Or am I thinking about this all wrong?

Answer 1

Karen,
You can easiliy create several portlets out of a Struts application. For detailed instructions, refer to the Struts section of the Portal Developer's Guide.
Good luck,
Peter