Building Portals with the Java Portlet API

Building Portals with the Java Portlet API has been my constant companion for the past few weeks. I am working with a set of inter-related portlets. This book has helped me out of a few jams. For example, this book describes accurately how to perform inter-portlet communication; conversely, many online resources led the developers in my group astray (to use vendor specific extensions that did not provide much value over what is included with JSR-168; one could say the extensions provided negative value over what was provided). If you are new to developing JSR-168 style Portlets and must use them, get this book. The book does not describe how to configure Pluto et al as these are emerging, nascent, forming implementation that seem to change quite often (for JSR-168 support anyway; JetSpeed is a lot more than just JSR-168). Once you get through the Pluto and/or Jetspeed, etc. hurtles this book is a great resource. My only complaint (a small one) is that this book could be smaller. I don't care about JFreeChart (yet anyway) or CMS solutions, and I have another book to explain Lucene (written by one of my favorite authors Erik Hatcher). I view these chapters as "bonus" chapters. Also, I suspect a future edition of the book would cover Spring MVC, JSF, WebWork and Struts support that exists for JSR-168 (most of which probably did not exist yet when this book was written as this book predates Pluto 1.0). With that one small complaint out of the way, this is the best resource that I know of on JSR-168 style portlets. Highly recommended.

This book was exactly what I was looking for - an introduction to the Portlet (JSR 168) specification. The authors cover the portlet spec and discuss WSRP and SSO in addition. This book doesn't detail out the entire API, but hits on the highlights necessary to become familiar with portlets. Good, solid introduction to an API that suffers from a lack of exposition.

Portals are becoming more popular as companies are looking for a single web-based entry point into their various applications. Java provides a standard portal model with JSR 168. This book is a thorough introduction into JSR 168 that will help get portal developers up to speed into this relatively new specification. The book starts with an excellent introduction into developing portlets. The first seven chapters cover all the details of developing portlets. Response and request objects are covered in detail. The portlet life cycle is clearly explained. Deployment descriptors are discussed. Integrating with Servlets and JSPs is described. The remainder of the book covers more advanced topics. Anyone working with a portal knows the problems with providing single sign-on to multiple applications. The authors discuss this issue giving several examples. The authors cover syndication, searching, personalization, web services, content management, and more. My only complaint with the book is that it uses the Apache Pluto portal, which is not in final release yet. Pluto is an open source portal but it is complicated to distribute content to it (you are forced to use Maven). When the book explains how to distribute portlets to Pluto it gets a little confusing because the authors need to explain multiple configuration files, some of which are exclusive to Pluto. Other than this one problem, the book gives a solid introduction to developing a portal providing detailed information of both the basics and many advanced concepts. Clearly the authors understand portal development and know how to pass that information on to their readers.

This should not be your first book on computers. It's not a beginners guide to FrontPage or something like that. On the other hand, if you've been assigned a portal project or are wanting to upgrade your skills at a professional level, this just may well be the book for you. This book presumes that you have some level of expertise at the Java Servlet level. That means that Java, Java Server Pages, Apache/Pluto, shouldn't be totally unknown to you. In fact, you should have Pluto running on you machine when you start. Having said that, then this book provides an excellent and clear introduction to portals. It further assumes that you may have to integrate your existing application (Oh wouldn't it be nice to start clean.) into a portal environment and discusses how to do this at length. If portals are your new thing, you won't go wrong by starting here.

This book provides an introductory level overview of the entire Portlet development process from tools installation to deployment. Some topics, like RSS, are given short shrift, but overall the topic coverage is consistent. The text is well written and easy to read, graphics and illustrations are used sparingly and to great effect. Enough time is spent on the introduction, basic concepts and the life cycle of a portlet to create a firm basis of understanding to layer the technical concepts on. That is what you want from a book like this and it delivers. This book is definitely worth a look for anyone looking to build portlets on the Java Portlet API.