COMS 6125 –Student Presentation Series

Web PORTAL Enhanced Information

Management

Sabyasachi Patjoshisp2705atColumbiadotEdu917-239-3806

Web Portals

Conglomeration of similar/different types of web contentdepending on the type of the Portal.

A Web portal, also known as a gateway, presents itself as a starting

point for Internet users when they first connect to the Web

Some popular names

An attempt to classify them

The presence of thousands of portals from diverse businesses andcommunities makes classification an arduous task. However broadly they can be classified as the following

Vertical PortalsThe vertical portals include information about a specific industry withcontents and links to other related websites.e.g-Cars.com , mp3.com

Horizontal Portals Yahoo and MSN are the most common horizontal portals whichcover a wide range of interests like news, finance, weather andEmail.

More CategoriesPersonal Portals, Knowledge Portals, Sports Portals and so on ..

Build your own portaliGoogle/My Yahoo

Could create personalized portals using iGoogle features by adding/editing tabs the page, choosing themes etc depending on yourinterests/ needs. My page pulls contents from New York Times, National Geographic Channel, Google News,Dictionary.comGmail,Gtalk,Google Travel, Calendar with a Viva Theme!

A Business Case

Lets assume a business scenarioMr. Bruno , CIO of Bank of Antarctica: My bank has tens ofdepartments-Retail banking, Investment Banking etc each having

a Different website.Couldnt it be great to have a one stop for all the customer needs ?.This will decrease transaction time and improveservice.

Commercial SolutionThere are commercial solutions from many vendors like IBM ,BEA , Jboss , Sun which can be used to build rich portal

applications In a very short development life cycle .

What Wonders can Portal do for you?

Authentication and AuthorizationThe first and cardinal functionalities of a portal is to authenticate

theusers and provide appropriate access level to the portal.

Directory ServicesThe portal platform should facilitate easy integration with the various directory services like LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory inorder to be able to perform the user authentication.

Content Management The user should be able to modify/add web/image content and publish to the portal web site.

More of them…SearchThe portal should provide an internal web search across the document database for user to locate the specific informationquickly and efficiently.

Personalization The users can add delete various web controls through the drag

anddrop options and generate a personalized page for themselves.

Pervasive ComputingThe portal should be accessible from various platforms

e.g. .wireless or mobile systems.

Also..Site Usage AnalyticsThe sensors in the portal sites would provide the site usage

analyticsreport which would be useful in modifying the application in order

toserve better.

Host IntegrationEnterprise Application Integration is one key element of the

portalsframeworks. In today’s enterprise environment, integrating with

otherplatforms like legacy systems with considerable ease.

Themes Themes control the overall styling of the web pages and can bemodified by the users with enough access. Themes are

responsiblefor the fonts, colors etc for the web pages.

Elements of a Portal PageThe portal page contains many portlets which is deployed in a Portal Container. The container provides the environment and manages the portlet life cycle.

Getting hands dirtyHello World Portlet

1)Create Portlet Java Class

public class HelloWorldPortlet extends GenericPortlet { protected void doView( RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response)

{ response.setContentType("text/html"); response.getWriter().write("Hello World!"); }}

2) Create a deployment descriptor by creating the file portlet.xml

and include the Portlet

<portlet-app><portlet> portlet-name>HelloWorldPortlet</portlet-name> <portlet-class>sample.HelloWorldPortlet</portlet-class> <portlet-mode>VIEW</portlet-mode</portlet> </portlet-app>

Continued …Sample

After doing minor configuration modifications, we can access theportlet through the browser.

Hmm but which one is the best?

This is a difficult question faced by many Project Manager/CIOs while choosing between multiple software vendors. My research paper compares five most popular portal platforms holistically onbasis of five weighted parameters.

• Ease to use• Cost • Support • Features • JSR 168 – Sun’s Portal Standards• WSRP –Standard for Remote Portlets from OASIS• Compatibility• Documentation

Never heard of any one looking for Portal Developers?

End of Presentation

Thank You