DL Template

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Introduction to Portals Portlets NGS Preview
9-10 December 2004 NESC
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Introduction to Portals Portlets

• What is a portal?
• Portal Technology
• Examples Portal Technology
• Portal Current Future Trends
• NGS Portal Setup
• Further Reading

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What is a Portal?

• Some definitions of a Portal
• An integrated and personalized web-based
  interface to information, applications and
  collaborative services.
• A term, generally synonymous with gateway, for a
  WWW site that is or proposes to be a major
  starting site for users when they get connected
  to the Web or that users tend to visit as an
  anchor site. There are general portals and
  specialized or niche portals.

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What is a Portal?

• contd
• An HTTP-based site hosted with special portal
  software that allows the aggregation of several
  different back-end systems, processes, or sites
  brought together through a single portal page.
  Portals may provide additional services such as
  single sign-on security, customization,
  personalization, and back-end administrative/decla
  rative application development.

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What is a Portal?

• All these definitions are a good if one can
  remember it!
• Portal means different think to different people
• Some examples of websites which are not Portals

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What is a Portal?

• Portal isnt MSN

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What is a Portal?

• Composite Web Page (MSN)

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What is a Portal?

• Contd MSN
• Configurable personal profile
• Logon with Passport
• select topics and sources for display
• "Pagelets" - small chunks of formatted HTML that
  are selected based on the profile
• Plus a few active controls (stock quotes)
• This is server-side DHTML

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What is a Portal?

• Portal isnt Share Point

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What is a Portal?

• Shared Folder Servers
• Producers and Consumers come from "the same end
  of the box"
• Exchange
• Share Point
• A File Server with a Web front end

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What is a Portal?

• In simple terms ,
• A Portal generates framework, and
• Portlets fill in the contents

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Portal Technology

• Some useful Portal concepts and terms
• Content aggregation The process of bringing
  together content from disjointed systems, via
  portlets, and controlled through the use of a
  portal.
• Portlet container Controls the access, lifetime,
  and interaction of a single portlet. Provides the
  content returned from a portlet back to the
  portal for merging with the content of other
  portlets.

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Portal Technology

• Some useful Portal concepts and terms (contd)
• Portlet Provides content to its calling portal
  container for the purposes of being displayed on
  a portal page.
• Fragments The content generated by a portlet is
  known as its fragment or fragment code. This is
  the HTML code generated from the portlet's
  rendering code.

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Portal Technology

• Portal content is constructed using Portlet(s)

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Portal Technology

• Portlets are like Servlets

Servlets Portlets
Complete HTML Generates fragments
Base URL Uses method to create a URL
HTTP headers No access to HTTP headers
Mime type/encoding No control of type
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Portal Technology
Servlets Portlets
Complete HTML Generates fragments
Base URL Uses method to construct a URL
HTTP headers No access to HTTP headers
Mime type/encoding No control of type
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Portal Technology

• Portlet Lifecycle
• Init
• Render
• Destroy

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Portal Technology

• Init Phase
• One-time initialisation of the portlet
• Init

Portlet Cache
Portlet
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Portal Technology

• Render Phase
• Is called per request and portlet's content is
  requested.
• getContent()

Portlet Cache
Portlet
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Portal Technology

• Destroy Phase
• Dependent on the life time definition of the
  portlet.

Portlet Cache
Portlet
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Portal Technology

• Portlet Modes
• View
• Displays the normal content
• Customise (Edit)
• Allows the user to customise the portlet
• Help
• Information on portlet

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Portal Technology

• Portlet Window States
• Normal
• Minimise
• Maximise
• Supported Media Types
• HTML
• WML (Wireless Markup Language)

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Examples of Portal Technology

• Jetspeed
• GridSphere
• uPortal
• GridPortal
• Websphere
• BEA Web Logic etc
• Ref. Portal Portlet 2003 workshop

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NGS Portal Setup

• NGS Portal built using the CHEF framework
• CHEF
• CompreHensive collaborativE Framework
• CHEF Technology
• Jetspeed (Special version)
• Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and
  XML.
• Turbine
• Servlet-based framework.

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NGS Portal Setup

• CHEF Technology (contd)
• Velocity
• Java-based template engine used to create
  templates according to the Model-View-Controller
  (MVC) model.
• RDF
• Conforms to W3C Resource Description Framework
  (RDF)

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NGS Portal Setup

• NGS Portal
• Machine spec.
• Redhat Enterprise WS release 3
• IBM HS20 blade with
• 22.8 GHz Xeon CPUs
• 2 Gb RAM
• 240 Gb EIDE hard disks (RAID 1 mirrored)
• 21 Gb Ethernet interfaces
• Runs Tomcat servlet container version 5.0.28
• Apache version 2.0.46 connects to Tomcat via
  mod_jk2 connector
• Uses PostgreSQL version 7.4.3 database

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NGS Portal Setup

• Things to be done!
• Add SSL to Apache
• Database replication
• Single sign-on using X509 certificate

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Portal Current Future Trends

• JSR 168
• Java Portlet Specifications
• Defined by Java Community Process (JCP)
• Provides a standard for interoperability between
  portlets and portals and between different
  vendors
• Pluto reference implementation of JSR 168
  compliant portlet container

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
• Another standard created by OASIS
• Specifies the remote rendering of Portlets
• A portlet can be hosted (produced) locally or
  remotely, separate from the portal using
  (consuming) the portlet

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Future versions of specification will outline the
  plans for
• Filters
• Similar to Servlet filters
• Interportlet communication
• This will allow one portlet to hook itself into
  another portlet, so that it can immediately be
  alerted to changes to the second portlet.

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Outer markup modification
• Allow portlets to influence the markup outside of
  their fragments (perhaps influencing the
  background colours of other portlets based on
  changes to the preferences of one portlet).

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Most Popular Enterprise Portal Server

Note Others contain MS Sharepoint (1),
Vignette(4), Plumtree(2), SAP Netweaver(2) and
Oracle (3) Portal Servers. Courtesy
www.ittoolbox.com
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Portal Current Future Trends

• Conclusions
• Open Source Portal Servers are in more use than
  the Commercial Portal Servers.
• eXo is the most popular portal server Liferay
  is closely behind.
• In commercial portals, IBM has the lead on BEA.
  Other commercial portals are far behind.

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Conclusion (contd)
• Standardization (JSR 168, WSRP, JCR) is one major
  popularity criteria. It may be the reason for eXo
  advantage.
• Integration with other products is not a primary
  criterion for portal popularity.
• Even the major portal features like content
  management and collaboration is down the wish
  list.

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Conclusion (contd)
• Development tool (again eXo has advantage) is
  another important popularity criteria for
  portals, at least among open source portals.

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Portal Current Future Trends

• Portals that were not included in the poll
• GridSphere
• Jahia
• PeopleSoft
• SunOne
• Novell Extend Director

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Further Reading

• JSR 168
• http//jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id168
• WSRP
• http//www.oasis-open.org
• Portals Portlets 2003 Workshop
• CHEF
• www.chefproject.org

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Introduction to Portals Portlets

• Questions
• Any Other Ideas for NGS Portal