Transcript Web Portals
Overview of Web Portals Jason Cook What is a Portal? A web site that provides specialized capabilities for visitors. Designed to use distributed applications, different amounts of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 2 Portals Available • • • • uPortal Sakai WebSphere WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 3 uPortal • Free, shareable • Uses Java, XML, JSP and J2EE • Built by a collaborative effort of JA-SIG (Java in Administration Special Interest Group) • Made very easy to get up and running with a single download, but recommended that real production users use the source release 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 4 uPortal • Relatively easy to get started but need Tomcat, J2EE and Ant experience • Was going to try myself but no Ant on Redcloud; as I wanted to see just how easy this would be to setup. 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 5 Sakai • Aims to create a Collaboration and Learning Environment for higher education. • Originally made by University of Michigan and Indiana University to replicate and extend their Course Management System (CMS). • Ideally uses existing services. • For new production uPortal is a better choice 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 6 Sakai • As it uses JSR-168 the use of context, access control, rich APIs is not possible. • JSR-168 is rather limited to Portlet->Portal interaction with no mention of using other APIs, which means they have to be hacked in. 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 7 WebSphere (IBM) • Commercial Product • Two versions: enable and extend • Has more robust features in analysis and Return on Investment (ROI) 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 8 WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) • “Standardizing presentation-oriented Web services for use by aggregating intermediaries, such as portals” • OASIS: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards • Lots of companies involved (IBM, Microsoft, etc.) 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 9 Conclusion • Not many to chose from even commercially • Replaceable with Web Services or other content management systems. • Largely Academic use. 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 10 References • • • • uPortal: http://www.uportal.org/ JA-SIG: http://www.ja-sig.org/ Sakai: http://sakaiproject.org/ uPortal vs. Sakai: http://www.sakaiproject.org/presentations/JASIG_ Sakai_UpdateFinalOnly.ppt#43 • OASIS: http://www.oasis-open.org /committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp • WebSphere (IBM): http://www-306.ibm.com/ software/genservers/portal/ 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 11 Questions~ ? 5/8/2006 jfcook/Web Portal 12