I am looking at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693411. It appears the root cause of the issue is that the format of the ".recent.resources" preference's value was changed in coregui from the format used by portal-war. coregui uses:
resourceId|resourceId|resourceId,...
but portal-war uses:
entityId|entityType|name,entityId|entityType|name,...
where entityId is either a resource or group id, and entity type is either "resource" or "group".
I think we should try to keep the format of existing preferences the same, and if we absolutely do need to change the format of a preference, we should change its name too. That way when a user upgrades from RHQ 3.x or JON 2.x, their existing preferences will still work, both on the coregui side and on the portal-war side (for iframes).
Thoughts?