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Enterprise Information Portal Technology resources
Portal products evaluation reports (related works)
Gartner Group lists eight components it identifies as critical for a complete Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) solution: security, caching, taxonomy, multi-repository support, search, personalization, application integration, and a metadata dictionary (http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/docs/PortalEvaluationCriteria.rtf - Portal Evaluation criteria from Gartner Group report).
Portal products market overview (based on Gartner Group reports) can be found herehttp://www.klubok.net/index.php?&file=article&sid=432 and herehttp://www.klubok.net/index.php?&file=article&sid=350 (in Russian).
http://www.niimle.ac.uk/docs/Portal%20Evaluation.PDF andhttp://www.niimle.ac.uk/docs/Portal%20Evaluation2.PDF – commercial portal products comparison
http://javaboutique.internet.com/reviews/Enterprise_Portals/ - four open-source portal products comparison
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=techwatch_report_0103 - Java Portals, Techwatch report TSW 01-03
Portal standards
We have found that JSR 168 and WSRP are widely accepted portlet standards for general purpose portals.
JSR
JSR 168 (Portlet Specification) -http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 (orhttp://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr168/)
http://jakarta.apache.org/pluto/ - Pluto is the Reference Implementation of the Java Portlet Specfication. The current version of this specification is JSR 168.
WSRP
Integration of content and application into portals has been a task requiring significant custom programming effort. Portal vendors or organizations running portals had to write special adapter portlets to allow portals to communicate with the different applications and content providers to accommodate a variety of interfaces and protocols. The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard simplifies integration of remote applications/content into portals so that portal administrators can pick from a rich choice of services and integrate it in their portal without programming effort. As a result, WSRP becomes the means for content and application providers to provide their services to organizations running portals in a very easily consumable form.
WSRP -http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp
http://ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/index.html - WSRP reference implementation and docs
Pages with bookmarks to other portal related resources
http://www.tic.udc.es/~fbellas/mypersonalizer/related/index.htm - list of portal technology related links.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/portalbytes - Portals & Portal Frameworks links.
Portal Products
There are a lot of specialized portal solutions but they do not meet our requirements, because we need general purpose Portal Platform with JSR/WSRP support. So the list of acceptable portal solutions is nailed down to Java based open-source general purpose portal frameworks.
Commercial portal products
Java based commercial offerings often include tools for building portals with little or no programming. The vendor often provides bespoke portal building consultancies alongside their products. This makes them more viable where local technical staff are unavailable. However, many of the commercial packages are aimed at integrating legacy information and financial systems. This makes a few of them more applicable to portals for use by an institutions administration than for academic oriented portals although most perform well in this arena too. However, their target market tends to result in these products being fairly expensive
Portals are available on a number of platforms in addition to those based on the Java platforms.
The top 3 commercial portal products are IBM WebSphere Portal, BEA WebLogic, Oracle9iAS Portal (http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/ias/portal/).
Non Java based open-source portal products
These are typically built on Linux platform but as they make use of scripting languages such as PHP and Perl it should be possible to port them to other platforms which support these scripting languages. However such OpenSource solutions should be regarded with some degree of caution as many are little more than a collection of scripts without the middleware layers required to provide performance and reliability or a maintainable architecture. Non-java commercial offerings do have the enterprise level middleware but these are based on proprietary technologies and architectures. Java based portals are built using enterprise level middleware which conforms to the open Java 2 Enterprise Edition specification and are portable amongst most major platforms.
Metadot (http://www.metadot.com/metadot/index.pl) is a popular open source portal software.
Content Management Framework (“Zope Portal Toolkit”) (http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/)
Portal.PHP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/portal-php/)
EZPublish (http://freshmeat.net/projects/ezpublish/)
Java based open-source portal products
Java based OpenSource solutions tend to be cheaper (in many cases free) than commercial offerings. However, many of the current OpenSource solutions are still in varying states of development, and all would require programming in order to build a real service.
Most of these portal solutions do not meet our requirements due to low functionality. The most advanced open-source portals we found are Jahia (http://www.jahia.org/jahia/Jahia) and Jakarta JetSpeed (http://jakarta.apache.org/jetspeed/site/index.html).
List of available Java based open-source portal products can be found here:http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/open_source_portal_servers_in_java.
http://www.liferay.com/home/index.jsp - Liferay is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168). Many useful portlets are bundled with the portal (Mail, Document Library, Calendar, Message Boards, to name a few) and can be used as examples for adding your own custom portlets. (based on Struts framework!)
http://www.exoportal.org/ - The eXo platform is a powerful Open Source - JSR 168 compliant – enterprise portal built from several modules. Based on the most innovative tools, API and frameworks such as Java Server Faces, Pico Container, JbossMX and AspectJ.
http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/download.html – JA-SIG uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies. uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE.
http://ccmdev.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/ - Red Hat Portal Server is a open source Portal solution. Supports multiple languages in its user interface and pervasive devices such as WAP, XHTML, and VoiceXML in its rendering pipeline. Portals can be built and targeted for the individual, for work groups or teams, for people with a common set of interests, and for large corporations and organizations.
http://jakarta.apache.org/jetspeed/site/index.html - Jakarta Jetspeed is an Open Source implementation of an Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and XML.
http://www.jahia.org/jahia/Jahia - Jahia An integrated web content management and corporate portal server; 100% Java based; Available under a collaborative source license (contribue or pay paradigm); Installed in minutes; Easy to use and to administer; Full Multilanguage and I18N support; Staging environement; Content Workflow; Content Versioning; Document Management (WebDAV Support); Built-in Portlet-based interface; Built-in support for standardized java web applications and web services (default servlets supported as portlets); Full web-based administration; Integrated with the Apache Lucene Search Engine; LDAP compliant; JSP and JSTL support for easy templates development; Integrated HTML cache engine; dynamic XML export module and much more...
http://www.gluecode.com/website/html/PFS.html - Gluecode Portal Foundation Server (PFS) is built in collaboration with the largest open source communities, including JBoss and Apache. It adheres to J2EE specifications, as well as implementations of portal industry standards.
http://jportlet.sourceforge.net/ - jPortlet is not JSR 168 compliant, but the jPortlet API is very similar to the IBM WebSphere Portal Server.
http://jporta.sourceforge.net/ - jPorta
http://www.gridsphere.org/ – GridSphere Portlet API implementation nearly fully compatible with IBM‘s WebSphere 4.2. Higher-level model for building complex portlets using visual beans and the GridSphere User Interface (UI) tag library. Flexible XML based portal presentation description can be easily modified to create customized portal layouts. Built-in support for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) separating users into guests, users, admins and super users. Persistence of data provided using Hibernate for RDBMS database support. Integrated Junit/Cactus unit tests for complete server side testing of portlet services including the generation of test reports. GridSphere core portlets offer base functionality including login, logout, user and access control management. Localization support in the Portlet API implementation and GridSphere core portlets support English, German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Greek.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103021/stories/2002/02/14/cocoonPortalFirstLook.html - Cocoon Portal Framework Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of ‘component pipelines‘, each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. The Portal Framework is based on Cocoon and is rumored to eventually support JSR-168.
http://www.xo3.com - OpenJODA is a fully Open Source Java Portal Server based on the java.apache.org and the JBoss projects. It includes the following technologies into one single easy to install package : - A servlet engine (Apache Tomcat) - An EJB container (JBoss) - A Web Framework (Apache Turbine) - A Portal Application (Apache Jetspeed) - A free database (Hypersonic SQL) Initial release including browsing and installation of external news feeds into a single web desktop.
http://www.tic.udc.es/~fbellas/mypersonalizer/ -- MyPersonalizer – MyPersonalizer is a J2EE based framework. The controller layer is built upon Apache Struts. MyPersonalizer also provides a number of command line administration tools for initialization tasks and a web administration tool to administrate any portal built with the framework.
http://www.owasp.org/oportal - The OWASP Portal project, oPortal, is a portal written in java that aims to become standard for secure web applications. The OWASP portal is based on the Jakarta Struts framework and designed with a security as a REQUIREMENT, not an option. A reference implementation of a secure portal, that will rival the likes of any commercially available portal. JSR-168 compliance scheduled for version 1.1 release.
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