Applications, Integration, and Data (6)
June, 2016 RESTful APIs, while not new, have only recently seen adoption in portlets. Why? They are often used to expose a service. In the case of portlets, there is often a more complete service that the portlet fronts. Another common use is to provide the back end of single page applications. It is this later use that is likely to drive more RESTful APIs in portlets.
June, 2016 Recently, I had the opportunity to add a new testing suite to a portlet. That suite is Jasmine, a JavaScript testing framework. The Survey Portlet is a modern portlet which leverages AngularJS. The Angular controllers needed to be tested as part of the project. In most Maven-driven Java applications that I have seen there is no testing performed on JavaScript. Jasmine integration is a step to correct this common shortcoming.
November, 2015 A common task when running a SAML Identity Provider (IdP) is integrating additional SAML service providers (SP). This task is not a trivial one, especially when compared to integrating CAS clients. New IdP administrators can run into problems before they even start with the technical task at hand because they aren't given the correct information to be successful.