Enterprises need more than just basic services; they need value-creating entities, which are crucial for running a successful business. Portals offer tremendous value to enterprises, and JBoss Portal Server is a popular, feature-rich open-source server that provides a standards-compliant platform to host functionality that serves the diverse portal needs of an enterprise. Its primary strength lies in its ability to provide robust support for custom implementation of functionality using the JSR-168 portlet API.

This book is a practical guide for installing, configuring and building feature-rich portal applications using the latest JBoss Portal Server 2.7.0. It explains, with examples, how portals can be easily developed, personalized, secured and integrated with other external enterprise assets..

The book will equip you with everything you need to know about JBoss Portal Server to build a fully functional portal. Using it, you can quickly come up to speed with the features offered by the portal server and can start using it almost immediately to develop enterprise portal solutions such as corporate intranets, B2B, or B2C sites. The book will help you to quickly understand and build enterprise portals with rich features such as personalization, AJAX, single sign-on, Google widget integration, remote portlet integration, content management and more. Along with feature implementation, the book also provides enough details for developers to tune and customize the portal environment to best suit the platform needs.

What you will learn from this book

* Covers the latest JBoss Portal Server 2.7.0 with support for JSR-286 Portlet 2.0 specification.
* Learn in detail about JBoss Portal and its components
* Configure the JBoss Portal Server software best suited for your environment
* Build portlets using common technologies such as Servlets, JSPs, and JSF to add functionality to your site
* Personalize and internationalize the portal so that the user identifies with it
* Create rich and dynamic portlets using AJAX for better user experience
* Add popular third-party components such as Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets to enhance the portal features
* Use databases in portlets to build custom user applications that persist data
* Learn how to configure single sign-on and fine-grained security in a portal
* Learn to use the content management system and empower users to actively manage their own content on the portal
* Establish inter-portlet communication and harvest the power of existing assets

Approach

The book is written from a developer perspective and uses an example-driven approach with extensive code samples on each topic, for easy understanding and learning. It starts with some basic concepts of portals, before going into the features and implementation of JBoss Portal and eventually discussing some concepts for advanced use. Each chapter provides a blend of just enough basic concepts to start building applications and detailed configurations for reference.

Who this book is written for

This book is for portal developers, portal administrators, designers and architects working on the Java platform, who want to build web portal solutions. The book doesn't expect an expert knowledge of portal or JEE technologies, but does presume a basic understanding of web technologies and the Java/JEE platform. However, the concepts are lucid enough that any competent developer can easily find immediate value in the book and start creating dynamic portal applications.