A gear is a Web utility or content area presented to a portal user within a portal page. Stock tickers, discussion forums, document exchange repositories, or news headline areas are examples of gears. Many gears allow the user to customize their content or appearance. Gears are also configurable by a community leader, who can change settings that are applicable for a particular community. For example, a discussion group gear might have membership policy settings that only the community leader can change. Gears can integrate syndicated content and services as well as enterprise content and applications.
To a developer, a gear is a small Web application consisting of the JSP files, Java classes, and data or content that comprise the service a portal user sees. The gear retrieves dynamic content and displays it on the portal page. Gears use many common services provided by the Portal Application Framework.
Gears are separately installable, and their layout on a Web page is customizable. They have different display modes, which reflect their size and appearance. Gears also have different gear modes, which reflect the functional mode a gear is in. Finally, gears can be configured for output on various devices (such as a browser or a wireless device).
Gears generally have a set of associated permissions as well. In the case of a discussion forum gear, for example, there might be security surrounding who can read, post to, or lead a forum.
A properly designed gear deploys easily into the Portal Administration Framework. Once this is accomplished, the gear can be customized by a portal administrator, a community leader, or an end-user.
Gears and Portlets
Portlets are the Java standard for portal components (JSR 168). ATG Portal supports the JSR 168 standard. You can deploy any standards-compliant portlet on ATG Portal. You can develop portal components as portlets, for full portability, or as gears.
