WebSphere Portal Development

Portal Highlights @ Lotusphere

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:09:05 +0000

A nice article was posted last night by bchaput, focussing on the highlights of the WebSphere Portal keynote session delivered by Larry Bowden (Lotusphere, Orlando)

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/WebSpherePortal/entry/portal_keynote_highlights_lotusphere31?lang=en

Come and see us at the WebSphere Portal Seminar.

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:27:37 +0000

Me and a collegue will present a seminar at februari 11th entitled, “Can your enterprise handle Generation Y”. In this seminar we’ll present you a look at the new kind of employee in your organisation and how websphere portal and additional products can help you with this.

The seminar will be held at Cronos, Veldkant 33A, 2550 Kontich, Belgium.

More information can be found at: this website

LotusLive Scores Huge Win at Panasonic over Microsoft Exchange

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:40:54 +0000

Panasonic has made it choice to switch to LotusLive:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/01/lotuslive-has-scored-a-big.php

Last week’s PoC

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:36:43 +0000

Last week, I did a proof-of-concept for a client that had a team who was responisble to investigate the
use of a portal in their organisation.
Because the team didn’t had earlier experience with portals, they gave us a usefull insight how companies look
at portals:

Why are they interesting in a portal server
What are their success factors for using a portal server
how critical do they want their portal to be
if they decide to use a portal server. Which portal suits their needs.

Before the PoC, the client saw the portal as a mashup with extra functionality.
Unfortunately this is not true. A portal needs a dedicated view, build on a specified portal api.
In order to have the added functionality a portal has to offer, you should speak the portal’s language.

Keeping your web application untouched and mash them togheter is like rebuilding a portal’s functionality, but
more restricted and not standarized. But it was a usefull insight from both the client’s as our point of view.
When looking at the success factors, the client was interested in inter-portlet communication, Single Sign On and advanced theme/branding.
Because the client has a userbase of 1000+ employees, they look for a very scalable and mature portal product.

Based on this requirements, I advised them to go for WebSphere Portal 6.1. It is portal 2.0-compliant and it has an excellent Single Sign On-
integration. We also took into account that WebSphere Portal is widely used in the client’s sector (health/insurrance), which makes them most suitable.

Portlet Development: Let’s go!

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:58:40 +0000

In this article I want to give you some of the basics about portlet development and standards around it, so we can make some cool examples afterwards.

Portal, Portlet, Portlet Container

It’s important to know the difference between this 3 terms.
The Portal is the overall application. You can think of a Portal as a web application running on a server. It can provide personalization for all or some portlets and all other portal functionality.
A portlet is a small portion of a page inside the portal. Much of it’s API looks the same as servlets, as we see later. But the big difference is that a servlet generates a complete html page, where a portlet only generates a part of it, so no -tag there!
A portlet container runs and manages the lifecycle of the portal.

API

The first standarized Portal API (1.0) is based on JSR-168. The current version is 2.0, based on JSR-286, and is rather complete when it comes to functionality. We gonna talk about this last version the most.
I will explain the differences during the examples to keep things clear.

Portlets are like Serlvets

To keep things simple, portlets are much the same as servlets. If you already know something about Servlets (and I recommand that), porting your knowledge to portlets will be easy.

Just like Servlets implement the Servlet interface, Portlets implement the Portlet Interface.
The portlet API also has a GenericPortlet.
Where servlets have servletrequests/servletresponses, portlets have portletrequests/portletresponses.

Well, I think you get the idea.

Portlets are not like Servlets

It would be too easy for us developers, if everything was the same for both. As you can see in the API, portlets do not extend from servlets. In fact, they are really different internally! They just kept the
names in the same way to let you feel comfortable and to prevent any confusion.

As I told before, portlets never generate a complete html-page. They are inside a portal page.
A portlet has a portlet mode. There are 3 modes: VIEW, EDIT and HELP, where VIEW is the default. I’ll make you understand this in the examples.
Portlets are more complex. Developers agree that developing portlets is more complex then developing servlets.
Where a ServletRequest is always a HttpServletRequest, a PortletRequest can be an EventRequest, an ActionRequest, a RenderRequest or even a ResourceRequest.
It’s like comparing men and women, where the men are the straightforward servlets and the women are the refined portlets. But unlike with women, you can play with several portlets at the same time!

Because you have several portlets at the same page, there can be interaction between portlets, and when you want to refresh a portlet, you actually refresh all portlets on that page.

A day at Devoxx

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:29:31 +0000

Today I attended the first conference day at Devoxx, which is actually day 3 (first 2 days are university days).

The start of the day was in a way a disappointment since, as many developpers, I wanted to know more about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and the future of Java. But since it is still an EU-issue, the keynote wasn’t really about that. Instead Sun and Oracle both had a seperate keynote. The last keynote was of Adobe which showed an overall view of some of the products they develop.

I was very interested too see Scott Ambler’s presentation. This presentation was about the agile vs the traditional vs the ad hoc development. Scott showed 20 myths about agile development and proved by statistics if they we’re right or wrong. Some examples:

Agile is just for small teams
Most agile temas are co-located
Agilists don’t write supporting documentation.

After showing the facts, all these myths proved to be incorrect. This presentation was great and Scott really is a wonderfull speaker, but what I missed in this presentation was his opinion about this mythes and how things could be better.

After lunch I stumbled upon the presentation about HTML5 Communications. I first attended James Gosling’s presentation, but since it seemed like a marketing presentation about the Java Store, so when the sound system broke down (for all rooms!) I switched rooms. The talk about Frank Greco was very good. Due to this HTML 5 event model, which will change a lot for all nextgen webapps. He even mention that the mashup-functionality of portals will become obsolete!

“Traditional Programming Models: Stone Knives and Bearskins in the Google Age” by Cameron Purdy used ‘Google’ in their name to get more attention, but it certainly was an interesting talk about distributed programming.

The most interesting talk of the day was without a doubt Doug Tidwell about Cloud computing. The presentation talked about solutions for the challenges cloud computing had, and Doug garanteed that Cloud Computing is the next big thing since the evolution of the web. And since we are all using cloud computing in our daily lives, he’s probably right.

The last presentation of the day I attended was about Lift, a framework for Scala. Timothy Perret started with an introduction to Scala, and after that went to Lift showing demo’s and code, which made it very straight-forward to follow.

Spring 3 Example Portlet and Overview

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:51:25 +0000

Andy Pemberton has written an article about the new Portlet 2.0 support in Spring 3. He uploaded a small example that you can put in your portal straight away. The article focusses on the interesting things Spring 3 is about to release when facing portlets.

http://blogs.captechventures.com/blog/andy-pemberton/spring-3-example-portlet-and-overview

JPolite, Portal in JS

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:02:32 +0000

Want to star your own Netvibes-like website? JPolite provides a lightweight front end Portal Framework based on jQuery. Version 2of this framework is build up unobtrusive, has various module types and templates and provides RESTful resource representation with XDO.

More info on the JPolite website

Portlets In Action, EAP

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:03:43 +0000

Manning is about to produce a new book in it’s ‘In Action’-family about the development of portlets. The book is written by Ashis Sarin and will contain 13 chapters of which only 2 are published so far in the early access phase. Reading this book for the first time, it looks promising, giving an easy to understand introduction to portlets.

The book uses Liferay as it’s default portal server, because it is available at no cost. The book focuses on the new 2.0 specifications and gives in depth information for using porlets with Spring MVC and the usage in the enterprise environment.

Overall this book looks very promising. It’s release date is planned for september 2010.

Public sites using WebSphere Portal

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:13:22 +0000

An interesting blogpost by Pierre Chauvin shows about 40 public websites which use WebSphere Portal in combination with Lotus WCM. It is interesting to see both which companies use WebSphere Portal towards their client base and how flexible you can brand/theme the layout.

Read the article