Introduction to Portals and Portlets


	BEA Home \| Events \| Solutions \| Partners \| Products \| Services \| Download \| Developer Center \| WebSUPPORT
	http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/index.html \| Search \| PDF Files \| Contact \| Glossary

WLCS Documentation \| Creating Portals and Portlets \| Previous Topic \| Next Topic \| Contents \| Index

Internet portals are a key part of many e-commerce applications. Portals provide an entry point to the Internet as well as value-added services such as searching and application integration. The Portal Framework provided with the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server allows you to quickly assemble both Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business portals that require personalized application content on the Internet.

This topic includes the following sections:

What Is a Portal?

Intelligent portals can act as tour guides to points of interest, tailored for individual user preferences. There are portals that concentrate on collecting and delivering specialized areas of information such as stock trading and finances, emerging technologies, or corporate information. For example, www.boston.com is a specialized news portal and www.schwab.com is a specialized financial portal. Other megaportals provide general channels of information such as health, weather, sports, news, e-mail services, chat rooms, news groups, and so on.

Internet portals are an efficient way to exchange large volumes of information with large groups of people. From the users' perspective, most portals are organized as a hierarchical Web site where the main page provides links to a set of pages that provide a more detailed view of the data.

Static portals, like many corporate home pages, provide a standard set of information to everyone who visits the site. In contrast, dynamic personalized portals, where the information presented may differ based on who is viewing the portal, represent a far more efficient and targeted way to do business. Well-known examples of dynamic portals include www.amazon.com, www.ebay.com, www.excite.com, and my.yahoo.com. With the Portal Framework, you can quickly build powerful, dynamic portals like these, as well as static ones.

The Portal Framework

The Portal Framework provides a collection of prebuilt JSP pages that provide the core functionality for portals. They are distributed as a Web application, and are located in %WL_COMMERCE_HOME%/config/wlcsDomain/applications/wlcsApp/exampleportal/portals/repository. The Portal Framework home page is located at http://localhost:portnumber/.

When using the framework, your pages will have a common layout. In this layout, a page's real estate will be divided into three main areas: a header, a content area, and a footer. The header resides at the top of the page and typically contains a full-sized logo for the site plus some navigation features. Placeholders for advertising can also be put into the header. The footer resides at the bottom of the page and typically contains legal notices, copyright information, and a small logo. The middle section, the content area, contains any number of small independent components called portlets. The JSPs included in the Portal Framework manage the layout of these portlets on the page.

The example portal demonstrates how the portal framework functions. The JSP source code in the example portal contains the HTML that controls the portal layout. Within an HTML table, portlets are dynamically included with <jsp:include> in cells. While the standard portal can handle up to three columns, you can easily add more columns by including a non-portlet column on either the left or right side of the table. For instance, the portlets could be in the three right-hand columns and behave as in the standard example. The left-hand column could be it's own JSP and might be a navigation bar. You can place portlets in any position as long as it is legal in HTML. To persist the portlet row-column position, you can use the API (for example, see the PortletJspBean in the Javadoc). Rewriting the example portal layout require some understanding of HTML and good Java programing skills. You can also make similar changes for headers and footers because they are also JSPs with HTML formatting. This means you can make the portal look like anything that you want.

What Is a Portlet?

A portlet is a highly focused channel of information served up by a portal. A portal can contain many of these information channels. For example, an online retail portal could provide a variety of interactive merchandise portlets, each presenting a different specialty category such as mystery books, classical music CDs, and baseball memorabilia.

Unlike a static portal page, deploying portlets with WebLogic Personalization Server gives our online retailer the ability to dynamically respond to customers based on user profiles. With this technology, not only can the retailer provide dynamic content, but also the customer can easily select and arrange their e-commerce portlets.

For example, a returning customer, Samantha, who loves mystery novels and ghost stories could select the "mystery" portlet as central to her standard view of the retailer's home page. This would be done by means of an edit page made available by the retailer. At the same time, the retailer could determine that Sam's purchase choices and portlet selections convey a taste for the unexplained. The Personalization Server lets you automatically generate responses to user profiles. A response could be the delivery of specialized information via a portlet. In the case of the mystery hound, our fictitious retailer could offer up recommendations about the latest thrillers and whodunnits on video.

Personalizing a Portal

Personalization allows you to customize your portals and portlets to serve a specific audience and purpose. The Portal Framework supports three levels of personalization, all of which can be administered with Web-based tools. The three levels of personalization are as follow:

Portal
Group
User

Personalization includes Web-based forms for adding and removing portal content, editing the content layout, and customizing the portal content color schemes. The user personalization information includes user information and general user preferences.

JSP Tags

Several JSP tags for Portal Management are included with WebLogic Personalization Server (Table 1-1). JSP tags allow developers to create personalized applications without having to program using Java.

For additional information see Portal Management JSP Tag Library Reference, in this guide.

Table 1-1 Java Server Page (JSP) Tags for Portal Management Overview

Portal Management	<esp:eval>	Evaluates a conditional attribute of a portlet. An example of a conditional attribute is isMinimizeable.
	<esp:get>	Retrieves a String attribute of a portlet.
	<esp:getGroupsForPortal>	Retrieves the names of the groups associated with a Portal.
	<esp:monitorSession>	Disallows access to a page if the session is not valid or if the user has not logged in.
	<esp:portalManager>	Provides the ability to do create, get, getColumnInfo, update, and remove actions on a Portal object.
	<esp:portletManager>	Provides the ability to do create, get, getArranged, update, and remove actions on a Portlet object.
	<esp:props>	Used to get a property from the Portal Properties bean, whose deployment descriptor contains default values used by the Portal Administration Tool.