5.1 Overview

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Use Java to portalize Domino applications when you need fully customizable portlets. Advantages of this approach are that Java offers: a rich class library, multithreading, code reuse, platform-independent applications, integration with 3rd party Java applications, object-oriented language features, advanced architecture, inheritance and design patterns, just to mention a few.

Java is the base programming language, ultimately used by all portlets running on WebSphere Portal. You are not limited by the functionality or the user interactions provided by portlet builders or existing portlets, or by any scalability limitations. When you create your own Java programs, you can deal with any issues that might come up.

You can develop portlets which are very fast and scalable in accessing Domino. To build such effective, scalable portlets, you should be aware of issues like session management, object pooling, how Domino Objects are handled, memory management, and so on. These issues are discussed in this chapter.

The disadvantages of developing in Java are that extensive Java programming skills and portlet programming skills are required, and in many cases the development time can be a lot longer than that of other integration techniques. In addition, a fair understanding of Domino objects structure is required.

5.1.1 Technologies involved

The technologies discussed in this chapter are the following:

Portlet
Portlet API
Domino Java architecture and Domino Java API
How to handle Rich Text fields
Collaborative Components API
Object Pooling
Logging
Struts framework

In the following chapter, we put this information to use by providing examples of adding functionality to portlets using these techniques.

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