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1.1 Portal evolution

As J2EE technology has evolved, much emphasis has been placed on the challenges of building enterprise applications and bringing those applications to the Web. At the core of the challenges currently being faced by Web developers is the integration of disparate user content into a seamless Web application and well-designed user interface. Portal technology provides a framework to build such applications for the Web.

If we take a step back in time to the original PC days when each application took up the entire screen and used all the computer's resources, the advent of Windows from Microsoft revolutionized the way we interacted with our desktop. A user no longer had to close one application to interact with another. Each application's content was aggregated to the desktop. This same evolution is taking place on the Web with portal technology.

Taking a shorter step back in time to the advent of the Web, initially interaction with the Web involved entering a single URL to access a single Web site much like the single application model of the early PCs. As the Web quickly evolved, so did the associated browser technology such as applets and browser plug-ins for technologies like Java. Unfortunately, these technologies never standardized and made the job of the Web developer very difficult when trying to provide cross-browser implementations . In parallel with these technologies, the desire grew for dynamic content on the Web and drove the development of Web servers into application servers that could serve dynamic content and technologies such as JSPs.

Support for portals evolved from this application server evolution along with the need to render multiple streams of dynamic content. The early portals fall in the category of roll your own . These are proprietary and specific to each implementation. As these portals grew, so did tooling and frameworks to support the building of new portals. The main job of a portal is to aggregate content and functionality. Portal servers provide:

• A server to aggregate content

• A scalable infrastructure

• A framework to build portal components and extensions

Additionally, most portals require personalization and customization. Personalization enables the portal to deliver user-specific information targeting a user based on their unique information. Customization allows the user to organize the look and feel of the portal to suit their individual needs and tastes.

WebSphere Portal provides a framework for addressing all these issues along with an open flexible infrastructure for creating many types or portals accessible from a wide variety of devices.

1.1.1 The generations of portal technology

Portals have gone through an evolution process of their own.

First generation portals

The first portals, known as first generation portals, were focused on providing static Web content, Web documents and live feeds. They were mostly an aggregation of content. In a corporate environment, they had a similar objective, providing a single interface to corporate information distributed throughout the enterprise. They typically contained information such as company news, employee contact information, company policy documents and other key Web links.

Second generation portals

Second generation portals are first generation portals with added features such as personalized, customized content and a search capability but are often a manual roll-your-own process.

Third generation portals

Third generation portals focus on specific information and applications. Integration has been added at the data level. These portals incorporate the notion of providing services along with the first generation idea of providing content. Another key feature of third generation portals is collaboration .

Collaboration portals provide the ability for teams to work in a virtual office. They provide content management services, the mining and organization of related information, along with collaborative services that allow users to chat, e-mail, share calendars and define user communities. Collaborative portals are typically internal corporate portal installations.

Fourth generation portals

Fourth generation portals are intended to address full-function e-business (Figure 1-1 on page 4). This involves integration with legacy applications at the component level. Enterprise portals have evolved from the provision of traditional employee self-service such as the HR policy to providing employees a complete set of comprehensive tools to enhance their productivity.

They take portals beyond the corporate boundaries for use by employees, suppliers and customers. They also provide access from multiple types of devices to address the diverse user communities in need of services. They offer the richest set of content and application choice via a single user interface to a diverse community including browsers and pervasive devices.They also provide automated personalization via based on business rules. The key to their further evolution is their open framework for common services.

IBM WebSphere Portal is a fourth generation portal providing organizations with a portal framework that connects a wide range of enterprise content and applications. It provides a high degree of integration technologies based on the J2EE platform. Its extensible architecture provides a scalable framework allowing adaptation to the changing needs of business.