Getting portal groups and user attributes to portlets

The package esup-portal-ws provides a web service to retrieve uPortal group and user information from portlets.

This looks like an alternative to the classloader games we sometimes play.

In the words of Pascal Aubry (as posted to jasig-portal):

One of the main issues we encountered when developing portlets is that the portal and the portlets run in different Tomcat contexts, which prevents from accessing the portal objects from the portlets, in particular, the groups and the user attributes (Note: hopefully this separation has many advantages).
The package esup-portal-ws solves this issue by providing a web service (executed by uPortal and interrogated by the portlets) which gives access to the portal groups and user attributes. We think that this project can be useful for the whole JA-SIG community, especially the people who develop portlets or port existing uPortal channels to portlets, and who want to keep a close integration between their portlets and the portal Information System.