Part1 - Introduction to Portals
Author: Venkateswarlu Srirangapuram (
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17 August 2007
Level: Basic
Portals:
All these days we hear the buzz word ‘Portals‘everywhere. As a beginner you must be wondering, what exactly these Portals are? Are they different from normal websites? Can those be customized and/or personalized? You will get familiar for all these questions in my multi-part series. This part explains basics of portals, features and advantages.
Introduction:
In an enterprise, it is often necessary to have a centralized, single, customizable application that provides access to enterprise applications, enterprise content integration. In an enterprise various users with different roles have access to applications such as admin users can have access to all the applications and basic users have access to just simple applications. It is often difficult to maintain all these roles and responsibilities in normal websites.
There are different portals available based on their usage. A web portal serves for the World Wide Web needs. A Personalized portal fulfills the personalized capabilities for its guests. These can be available in personal computers, and wireless devices. An enterprise portal provides all the enterprise information.
Enterprise portals became popular as they provide integration of enterprise content on a nice and look-and-feel interface. This article mainly focused on enterprise portals; often these are called intranet portals. Below are the list of cool features and advantages of enterprise portals:
- Web based look-and-feel single point of interface
- Drag and drop components, portlets. (we will discuss these later)
- Uniformity, ease of navigation, color schemes, logos, icons.
- Aggregation of content from different data sources across the enterprise.
- Sophisticated personalization features to provide customized content to the users.
- Single-Sign-On for various applications and provides internal/external access.
- Handles thousands of user requests.
There are several portals available in the market such as WebSphere Portal from IBM, Oracle portal, Vignette Portal, and BEA WebLogic Portal. All these portals provide above functionalities.
Portlets:Portlet is a portal key component which is responsible for displaying content in web browser. You can think of portlets as being windows displayed in your desktop environment. If you look at popular iGoogle home page, you can see several cool portlets. These portlets have edit settings, minimize, and close functionalities. You can just drag and drop on to your page.
For example, in weather portlet you can set your home city for weather information. This weather portlet displays tailor-made information in your home page. There are other portlets available such as Calendar, News, and Currency converter. You can arrange all these portlets wherever you want in your homepage. What do you think about portals now? Aren’t they cool? You definitely love those, don’t you?
Standards:
Users can think of all these portlets as simple windows, but for developers they are very complex components contain complex business logic. Often they interact with internal data sources as well as external legacy systems of enterprises.
Late 1990s were a time of innovation for the concept of corporate/intranet portals. The companies recognized the importance of the portals and they formed as a group and started thinking of specifications for implementation. As a result the Java Portlet Specification JSR168 came up with portlet development standards. JSR 168 standards emerged in early 2000 and the first version was developed and released under the Java Community Process (JCP)
JSR168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, and administrators to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions. You should have a good understanding of Java programming, servlet programming and JSR168 programming to develop the portlets.
Conclusion:
I hope this part has given you overview of portals, portlets, standards, and advantages. The popularity of content aggregation is growing and portal solution will play significant role for corporates in next few years.
In my next part of series, I will explain the architecture of portals and portlets. Thank you for spending your time reading this article and I’d be interested to hear about your comments and suggestions. I hope it has helped you in some small way. Resources:
About the author
Venkateswarlu Srirangapuram is a Software Consultant in the Eastray Technologies Inc., He is IBM Certified Solution Developer, WebSphere Portal 5.1. Currently, he works from Central Florida at client’s site.
