Portal is a concept, a technology that is not new to those who are developing portal applications. Nobody can deny its usefulness for developing portal applications. Features such as authentication, personalization, content aggregation, customization, etc. allow us to completely develop our complex portal applications on the existing portlet technology. Portal guides are often not detailed enough. In "Portlets in Action", Ashish Sarin gives us great detail. He sumarizes his portal development experiences and walks us through real-world requirements.
Sarin covers basic concepts such as portal, portlet, portlet container, portlet lifecycle, etc. to help both newcomers and those who are experienced with portal to be able to play their portlets on the portal. Theory is integrated with detailed, specific examples of each business requirement in order to give readers relevant techniques for their specific purposes.
Popular web technologies like Spring portlet MVC, Tag library, Hibernate, Ajax, DOJO, DWR, JQuery, etc. are each integrated into the examples. More advanced topics like communication with other portlets, web services for remote portlets, porting web applications to portlets using portlet bridges that help with migrating applications, are all covered in individual chapters.
Sarin also includes common examples that can be run on all of the popular portals. He always follows the standards used in portals JSR-286. It is not easy to be compatable with everything, but Sarin has done a large part of this successfully. Default examples are explained and illustrated for the Liferay portal and are also tested on the GateIn portal.
This book is still in the MEAP version and does not give detailed features of each specific portal. The author does, however, introduce some individual features, such as role-based security in GateIn and Liferay.
I find this book valuable for web developers interested in using powerful support to build web applications based on portal.
(Posted at Dzone)
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