Chapter 10. The JBoss Portal and portlets
This chapter covers
- Understanding portals
- Installing the JBoss Portal
- Developing a portlet
- Configuring a portlet
- Creating a portlet instance
- Creating a portlet window
The JBoss Portal is worthy of a book in its own right, so we can’t do it complete justice in two chapters. Our aim is to introduce you to working with the Portal so that you feel familiar enough with it to tackle more in-depth portal-related topics. Portals enable you to build websites by putting together disparate pieces of code, called portlets, into a single page, making those separate applications appear to function as one. In addition, many portals enable users to customize the layout of their home pages to include the information they’re most concerned with, making it more likely that the users will use those pages as portals into the World Wide Web.
We recommend that you read the Portal documentation, but we don’t assume that you have any experience with portals. Therefore, this chapter and the next, “Configuring the JBoss Portal,” can serve as an introduction into portals. But if the Portal documentation covers a particular topic—such as installation—in detail, we cover it only briefly here. In addition, the documentation that accompanies the Portal provides a good introduction to portals in general and the JBoss Portal specifically.