What is the best way to deploy portlets within Portal environment?

This article lists down different ways of deploying portlets within Portal environment listing advantages and disadvantages of each.

Portlet Deployment

One Portlet per war

In this approach, each portlet is bundled as one war file.

Advantages:

• Abstraction to the lowest level
• Independent development and testing of portlets
• Change to single portlet will not impact other portlets within portal

Disadvantages:

• Messy deployment as the number of portlets grow
• Sharing of portlet session is an issue

All portlets in a single War file

In this approach, we pack all the portlets in one war file.

Advantages:

• Clean deployment, easy to manage
• Easy to share portlet session

Disadvantages:

• Parallel development is a challenge
• The size of the deploying war becomes extremely large and takes a long time to deploy
• Single change in one portlet will cause a redeploy of all portlets, adding re-testing overheads and making portal unavailable

Grouping portlets in one war

This approach refer to portlets grouped together based on function/ same functionality into single WAR files. 

Advantages:

• Small changes to a functionality will not affect the overall portal
• Clean and easy to manage
• Portlets which need to share session will be grouped into one
• Parallel development at functionality level is possible

Disadvantages: 

• Maintenance at individual Portlet level might affect other packaged portlet of the application