The ice-extras.js file is now written out for all portlets all the time. It does not completely solve this problem but behaviour is better.

1. The modal popup does not appear as the topmost window - FIXED
2. The modal popup does not grey-out the rendered browser page under it - FIXED
3. The modal popup window does not take control over the entire browser window - FIXED
4. The draggable panel renders but is not draggable - FIXED
5. The "Close" button on the draggable panel does not close the draggable panel - NOT FIXED

In addition, having multiple instances of the popup panel seems to adversely effect the behaviour so perhaps multiple copies of the ice-extras.js file do not play well together. Further investigation is required.

Revising the subject line to be more generic.

So although it's not completely fixed, a couple of new issues have cropped up.

1) The modal dialog is completely disabled in IE.
2) Adding another portlet to the page causes popups to stop working properly.

FYI, a Liferay customer just wrote the following regarding a sample portlet I provided him that attempts to demonstrate the modal popup feature:

Thanks for the demo!

The dialog indeed is displayed but can't be closed and is not modal for me... So evidently it needs some work, hopefully ICEFaces team will figure it out... But it is a great start...

--Neil

I simplified the test case further and started with the non-modal popup. It seems that the culprit for the Close button not working on the draggable is the type="button" attribute. Removing this seems to make the "Close" button work again. In checking the 1.5.3 release, that attribute is in the component-showcase example for popups but has since been removed. The spec for command button says that the only valid values are "submit" (the default) and "reset". In any event, the draggable popup seems to work as advertised in the test portlet when the suggested changes is made.

The modal dialog code didn't have the type attributes set for the close button so didn't show the issue. I tried putting two instances of the test portlet on the same page and, once the above changes was made, both types of popup panels appeared to work as per the component showcase example. There may still be some work around how popups should be "owned" by the portlet that spawns them (e.g. should a modal popup be modal for the whole page or should it just be model for the parent portlet) but that discussion should probably be done elsewhere. At this point, it appears that popups generally work in Liferay.

Marking as FIXED for 1.7 DR#1