Internet Engineering
Portal
Outline
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Introduction
Portal Architecture
Java Specification for Portal (JSR 168)
Cocoon
Introduction
• A portal, or enterprise information portal (EIP), is a Web site that
integrates an organization's knowledge base and all related applications
into a single user-customizable environment.
• This environment acts as a one-stop shop, or "gateway," for users'
information and system needs.
• Enables an organization's entire content database; search facilities;
collaboration tools; individual department, workgroup, and projectspecific intranets; online applications; and security mechanisms fused
into one cohesive environment that's accessible from a single starting
point.
• It gives large amounts of disparate content and applications an overall
sense of unity and continuity.
• One important feature of a portal is Personalization
Introduction (cont.)
• My Yahoo! and MSN are perfect examples of Internet portals. Users
have the ability to select only the news that's of interest to them —
news stories and weather reports in their home city, the results from
their favorite sports teams, the latest from their industry, and their daily
fix of stock quotes — without having to sift through mounds of content
that's not relevant to them.
• EIPs are developed specifically to work within business environments,
often integrating standard corporate collaboration tools — e-mail,
shared calendars, discussion forums, and online meetings
• This not only eases software rollout and maintenance but also reduces
total cost of ownership because you're dealing with one portal suite
rather than separate software tools.
• Since portal software integrates various key components into one suite,
you don't have to negotiate multiple licensing agreements and support
contracts.
Introduction (cont.)
Seven common portal applications
• Line-of-Business portals: provide easy access to
applications that serve a specific area, such as
procurement or human resources.
• Corporate Intranet Portal: acts as gateway to
other portals and websites operated by an
organization.
• Corporate Extranets: act as an interface between
companies, customers and suppliers, revealing
subsets of information to specific audiences.
• Customer Service or Self-Service: are subsets of
a corporate Extranet, delivering online
personalized content and services, as well as
training, support and more.
Seven common portal applications
(cont.)
• Team or Divisional Portal: is used by
groups or communities that want to share
specific content or business functions.
• Personal Portal:
This portal is geared to assist individuals
who access information and resources.
• Enterprise Portals: The Enterprise Portal
is the central portal for an entire
organization.
Main Features
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Content and document management — services that support the full life cycle of
content and document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval,
version control and scheduled publishing. Some portal solutions providers aim to
remove the need for a third-party content management system.
Collaboration — portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat, or
messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums)
and blogs.
Search & Navigation — Content is meant to be read, so on the usage side of the
equation, being able to find and retrieve targeted content is the essential task. As more
content is added to repositories, the more valuable those repositories become.
Unfortunately, retrieving useful information becomes more difficult as the volume of
information grows unless effective search and navigation methods are employed.
Personalization — the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of
content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.
Entitlement — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content
and services users have access too. For example, a company's proprietary information
can be entitled for only company employee access.
Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new
components/portlets.
Single sign-on — most enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities to their
users. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the
mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.
Features
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Calendars and to-do lists - schedules, hours of operation
Discussion groups and chat
Announcements & alerts
Job openings, career opportunities
Reports and documents
Personal HR info - benefits, medical info,
Access to data warehouse
Search
E-mail and address book
Collaboration - intranet and internet
Applications - including access to legacy systems
Work flow
Features (cont.)
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Course schedules, grades, GPAs, transcripts, etc. , degree audit
Residence hall menus
News - campus and world
Weather
Maps and images
Org charts
Finance - stocks and investments, expenses, budget, credit
union, bank accounts
Access to online shopping and vendors
Links - reference material, bookmarks
IP telephony
Portal example - MSN
Search
Channels
(a.k.a portlets)
Portal example – my yahoo
Links
Channels
Portlet
• Portlets are web components--like servlets--specifically
designed to be aggregated in the context of a composite
page.
• Usually, many portlets are invoked to in the single request
of a portal page.
• Each portlet produces a fragment of markup that is
combined with the markup of other portlets, all within the
portal page markup
• In a typical portal page there are different windows. Each
window is represented by a portlet.
• Each window can be a different application and they
maybe developed independent of each other.
Elements of a Portal Page
Portlet technical aspect
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portlet is a class that implements the javax.portlet.Portlet
interface and is packaged and deployed as a .war file inside of a
portlet container.
Portlets are similar to Servlets, in that:
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Portlets are managed by a specialized container.
Portlets generate dynamic content.
A portlet's life cycle is managed by the container.
Portlets interact with web client via a request/response paradigm.
Portlets are different from servlets, in that:
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Portlets only generate markup fragments, not complete documents.
Portlets are not directly URL addressable. You cant send somebody URL
of a portlet. You can send him the URL of the page containing a portlet.
Portlets cannot generate arbitrary content, since the content generated by
a portlet is going to be part of portal page. If a portal server is asking for
html/text, then all portlets should generate text/html content. On the
other hand, if the portal server is asking for WML, then each portlet
should generate WML content.
HelloWorld portlet
public class HelloWorld extends GenericPortlet{
protected void doView(RenderRequest request,
RenderResponse response) throws
PortletException, IOException {
response.setContentType("text/html");
response.getWriter().println("Hello Portlet");
}
}
Deployment descriptor
<portlet>
<description>HelloWorldDescription </description>
<portlet-name>HelloWorld </portlet-name>
<display-name>Hello World </display-name>
<portlet-class>com.test.HelloWorld </portlet-class>
<expiration-cache>-1 </expiration-cache>
<supports>
<mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
<portlet-mode>VIEW </portlet-mode>
</supports>
<supported-locale>en </supported-locale>
<portlet-info>
<title>Hello World</title>
<short-title>Hello World </short-title>
<keywords>Hello,pluto</keywords>
</portlet-info>
</portlet>
Deployment in Pluto
• Pluto is the reference implementation of JSR 168 (Portlet
specification)
• portletentityregistry.xml :
<application id="5">
<definition-id>HelloWorld</definition-id>
<portlet id="1">
<definition-id>
HelloWorld.HelloWorld
</definition-id>
</portlet>
</application>
Open Source Portal Solutions
Portal Software
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uPortal
Blackboard Portal System
Microsoft Sharepoint
Sun One Portal Server
…. etc etc ….
Portals @ Apache
• Top-level ASF project
• Contains several portal-related sub-projects
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Jetspeed 1
Jetspeed 2
Pluto
WSRP-4J (Web Services for Remote Portlets)
• Cross-pollination with other Apache projects
– Maven
– Jakarta Tomcat
– Cocoon
What is Apache Cocoon?
• A publishing engine
• An application framework
• A panacea for the internet
pan·a·ce·a
n.
A remedy for all diseases, evils, or
difficulties; a cure-all.
Gregarious Cocoon
Same again…
Once more, different view
The Project
• Origins
– Started in 1999 by Stefano Mazzocchi
• Redesign of apache.org
• Frustrated by the limitations of HTML
• Wanted to use emerging technologies (XML/XSL)
– Today
• Now one of the most important Apache projects
• Incorporates technologies from various projects
• Just under 2000 registered on all mailing lists
Overview
• XML publishing / application platform
• Framework integrated into a Servlet
• Makes extensive use of XML and XSLT
• Aim: Separation of Concerns (SoC)
• Management, Logic, Content, Presentation
• Written in Java
Overview
• Dynamic Document Generation
– Based on XML and XSLT
– But not limited to …
• Runs in different environments
– Servlet Engine
– Command line
• Used in various scenarios
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Web sites
Web publishing
XML portals
XML processing systems
…
What’s it look like?
Separating Content and Layout
Building a Pipeline
The Sitemap
• Centralised configuration file
– Sub-sitemaps possible
• Contains set of ready-to-use components
– Use them to build functions
– Write and “drop in” your own
• Contains collection of Pipelines
<map:sitemap>
<map:components>
<map:generators/>
<map:transformers/>
<map:serializers/>
<map:readers/>
<map:selectors/>
<map:matchers/>
<map:actions/>
<map:pipes/>
</map:components>
<...>
<map:pipelines>
<map:pipeline/>
<map:pipeline/>
<...>
</map:pipelines>
</map:sitemap>
Defining a Pipeline
• Pipelines are specified in the Sitemap
– Describes the processing steps for a request
–<map:match
Matches
a pipeline to a request URI
pattern="helloworld" type="wildcard">
<map:generate type="file" src="helloworld.xml"/>
– Example:
http://localhost:8888/helloworld
<map:transform type="xslt" src="helloworld2html.xsl"/>
<map:serialize type="html"/>
</map:match>
Matching a request
• Matcher
– Matches the incoming request to the correct pipeline
– Different types of matchers available
– Most common: wildcard
<map:match pattern="news/*" type="wildcard">
<map:generate src="newsfeeds/{1}.xml" type="file"/>
<map:transform src="news2html.xsl" type="xslt"/>
<map:serialize type="html"/>
</map:match>
<map:match pattern="products/*" type="wildcard">
<map:generate src="products/infos/product_{1}.xml"
type="file"/>
<map:transform src="products2html.xsl" type="xslt"/>
<map:serialize type="html"/>
</map:match>
Complex Pipeline
• Transformer example with commands
Multi Channeling
But there is more
• Many usable components
• Managing the application
– Flow control
– Input modules
• More features in the Sitemap
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Content Aggregation
Redirects
Resources
Views
A Typical Installation
A Typical Installation
Benefits
• No real alternative
– That offers everything available in Cocoon
• XML driven architecture
– Extensible with own components
• Flexible data integration and publishing
– Often: no programming needed
• Large code base
– Many components provided
– Most of the hard work is already done
History of the Cocoon Portal
• Started in September 2000
– Commercial product developed by S&N
– Based on Cocoon
– Additional components and project specific additions
– CMS, Tools, documentation, training
• Completed in mid 2001
– sunRise and sunSpot
– Used in various projects
• Donated to the Cocoon project in February 2002
– Used around the world
• Started new Portal Engine in the end of 2002
– Together with other interested parties
– The usual advantages
• New portal engine in Cocoon since the beginning of 2004
Common Requirements…
• Integration of different data sources
– Static sources (HTML, XML, Office Documents…)
– Dynamic sources (CMS, Archives…)
– Databases (SQL DB, XML DB, LDAP…)
– Complex Applications
• Single Sign-On
• Personalisation
• Individualisation
• Multi Channel
– PCs (HTML, XML)
– Mobile, Organizer (WML)
– Documents (PDF, Office Documents)
– Email
– Applications
…fulfilled by Cocoon
• Integration of data sources
– Advantages of the pipeline concept
– Different Generators for retrieving data
• Complex Applications
– Logic: Page Flow and Actions
• Single Sign-On
– Authentication framework
• Personalisation and Individualisation
– Different Transformers for manipulating/augmenting
data
• Multi Channel
– Stylesheet Transformations for various output formats
Getting Content from Coplets
• Coplets are “Cocoon Portlets”
• Different types of coplets
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Static
URI based
Pipeline based
JSR 168 portlets
Custom
The Cocoon Portal
Coplets in action
Static Coplet
XML File
Dynamic Portlet
using JSR 168
Role Dependent Coplet
Pipeline: XML + XSLT
Dynamic RSS Coplet
Pipeline: Remote XML
XSLT
Static Coplet
Own Java Class
Cocoon Portal
• Definition and configuration in XML
– Layout (ordering) separated from content
– Using existing types
– Requires no Java coding
• Predefined coplet types
– Simple usage of Cocoon for delivering content
– Requires no Java coding
Cocoon Portal Internals
Portal
Generator
Portal Manager
Transformer
Serializer
Profile Manager
- Portal Profile
- Layout
Coplet
Adapter
Custom
Event Manager - Publish and Subscribe
JSR 168
Renderer
URI
Coplet
Container
Portal Features
• Everything is configurable
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Available coplets
Features of a coplet
Layout information
User rights
• Flexible Presentation
– Stylesheets for multi-channel
– Coplets can be channel-dependent
• Parallel Processing
The Portal Stack
References
• Wikipedia
• http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/
09/14/what-is-a-portlet.html
• Java.sun.com
• Cocoon.apache.org