Introduction to Portals &
Portlets
NGS Preview
9-10 December 2004 NESC
Dharmesh Chohan
Daresbury Laboratory
Grid Technology
Introduction to Portals & Portlets
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What is a portal?
Portal Technology
Examples Portal Technology
Portal Current & Future Trends
NGS Portal Setup
Further Reading
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• cont’d
– 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/declarative
application development.
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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• Portal isn’t MSN
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• Composite Web Page (MSN)
Browser
Chunks 'O HTML
Editors
selecting and
formatting
manually
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• Cont’d 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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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• Portal isn’t Share Point
Course Management or
Collaboration Server
Class
or
Workgroup
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
What is a Portal?
• In simple terms ,
– A Portal generates framework, and
– Portlets fill in the contents
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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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
Dharmesh Chohan
DaresburyName
Laboratory
merging with the
content
of otherPresenter
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10 December
2004
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
portlets.
Portal Technology
• Some useful Portal concepts and terms
(cont’d)
– 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.
Dharmesh Chohan
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Portal content is constructed using
Portlet(s)
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Portlets are like Servlets
Servlets
Complete HTML
Portlets
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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
Servlets
Complete HTML
Base URL
HTTP headers
Mime type/encoding
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Portlets
Generates fragments
Uses method to
construct a URL
No access to HTTP
headers
No control of type
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Portlet Lifecycle
– Init
– Render
– Destroy
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Init Phase
– One-time initialisation of the portlet
Init
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Portlet
Portlet Cache
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Render Phase
– Is called per request and portlet's
content is requested.
getContent()
Portlet
Portlet Cache
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Destroy Phase
– Dependent on the life time definition of
the portlet.
Portlet
Portlet Cache
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Technology
• Portlet Window States
– Normal
– Minimise
– Maximise
• Supported Media Types
– HTML
– WML (Wireless Markup Language)
31/05/2016
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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Examples of Portal Technology
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•
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Jetspeed
GridSphere
uPortal
GridPortal
Websphere
BEA Web Logic & … etc
Ref. Portal & Portlet 2003 workshop
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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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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10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
NGS Portal Setup
• CHEF Technology (cont’d)
– 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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
NGS Portal Setup
• NGS Portal
– Machine spec.
• Redhat Enterprise WS release 3
• IBM HS20 blade with
– 2*2.8 GHz Xeon CPUs
– 2 Gb RAM
– 2*40 Gb EIDE hard disks (RAID 1 mirrored)
– 2*1 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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Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
NGS Portal Setup
• Things to be done!
– Add SSL to Apache
– Database replication
– Single sign-on using X509 certificate
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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.
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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).
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Current & Future Trends
Most Popular Enterprise Portal Server
Note: Others contain MS Sharepoint (1%),
Vignette(4%), Plumtree(2%), SAP Netweaver(2%) and
31/05/2016
Oracle (3%) Portal Servers.10 December 2004
Courtesy: www.ittoolbox.com
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
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.
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Current & Future Trends
• Conclusion (cont’d)
– 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.
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Current & Future Trends
• Conclusion (cont’d)
– Development tool (again eXo has advantage)
is another important popularity criteria for
portals, at least among open source portals.
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Portal Current & Future Trends
•
Portals that were not included in the poll
– GridSphere
– Jahia
– PeopleSoft
– SunOne
– Novell Extend Director
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Further Reading
• JSR 168
– http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168
• WSRP
– http://www.oasis-open.org
• Portals & Portlets 2003 Workshop
• CHEF
– www.chefproject.org
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology
Introduction to Portals & Portlets
Questions
&
Any Other Ideas for NGS Portal
31/05/2016
10 December 2004
Dharmesh Chohan
Presenter
DaresburyName
Laboratory
Facility
Name
Grid Technology