Form Builder for uPortal: A Case Study in Web Components & Microservices
Channel: Apereo Foundation
Date: 20/09/2018

uPortal is in the midst of a remarkable transformation from a container for JSR-286 Portlet-based content to a modern platform for Web Components.  In this webinar we will cover:

The reasons for this change
The tactics & technologies employed in making this change;  and
The progress so far

The focus of this session will be on practical examples and techniques for creating new uPortal content in this model.  In furtherance of that aim, we will take a close look at one of the newest and most ambitious web components in the uPortal Ecosystem:  form-builder.

Form-builder is a new module that allows uPortal adopters to configure and display custom web forms in the portal and capture user form submissions.  Form-builder is a web component built in Node.js with React and other Node modules.  It interprets JSON Schema documents to render web forms.  Form-builder is a non-Java and completely client-side component.

The “back end” for form-builder is implemented separately and is named “Form Builder Microservices,” or FBMS for short.  FBMS is developed with Spring Boot 2, Spring Security, and spring-data-jpa.

Form-builder and FBMS are open source (Apache 2), released, and available now to bring custom web forms into your portal.