Page Comparison

Developing content and applications for use with uPortal

What kind of experience is necessary to develop content and/or applciations for use with uPortal?

It depends upon what kind of content you want to deliver through the portal. For simplest content provision, you only have to know how to produce an html document. One of the defined kinds of channels for use with uPortal is an RSS (RichSite Summary) channel, the same format that Netscape uses for their Internet portal. If you create an XML document which adheres to this standard , the uPortal framework will handle formatting and presenting the output for you. To deliver content which requires complex user interaction, you'll have to create a complete web application which uses a channel as its user interface. This approach requires that you have the XML, Servlets and SQL skills that someone developing a campus portal instance using uPortal has (see above) as well as experience with:

• JDBC. It's likely you will want your application to store information in and retrieve information from a database, so the ability to use the Java Database Connectivity API will be essential. The portal itself requires a relational database to store information related to users and their preferences, and the standard way for your application to access this information is by using JDBC. If you're not familiar with the JDBC API, (White1999) is a comprehensive tutorial, reference and source of sample code.

• EJB. If your application requires distributed data access, transactions and persistence, the Enterprise Java Beans distributed component model will probably become an important part of your architecture. For EJB beginners, (Monson-Haefel2000) provides a complete reference. To get an idea of what you're in for when you begin developing channnels, carefully read Michael Oltz' tutorial.

My university has a large number of legacy applications that we want to provide access to from the portal. Can I do this?

Maybe. It depends upon the application. Did you write the application (and have the source code) or did you purchase a binary package from a vendor? If you have the source code, its relatively easy to create an alternate user interface to the application that operates within the portal. in uPortal parlance, this would be called a "channel". Your channel would display itself to the user in the portal and feed the input from that user to your application. Your legacy application would then process the data and send the output back to the channel, and the channel would in turn display the results to the user inside the portal.

If you purchased an application from a vendor, things are a bit more complicated, but the high-level approach is the same. You'd have to write an adaptor that would wrap the output of the legacy application in XML so that it can be displayed inside the portal. When you have this, you can then write a channel for use with the portal that interacts with your adaptor and actually facilitates the translation of the XML so that the portal can display it.

Appendix

References

Books

[1] [Bradley2000] Neil Bradley. Copyright © 2000 Neil Bradley. 0-201-67487-4.
The XSL Companion. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

[2] [Gulutzan1999] Peter Gulutzan1999 and Trudy Pelzer. Copyright © 1999. 0-879-30568-1.

SQL-99 Complete, Really. CMP Books.

[3] [Harold1999] Elliotte Rusty Harold. Copyright © 1999. 0-764532-36-7.
XML Bible. IDG Books.

[4] [Hunter1998] Jason Hunter and William Crawford. Copyright © 1998. 1-565923-91-X.
Java Servlet Programming. O'Reilly & Associates.

[5] [Kay2000] Michael Kay. Copyright © 2000 Wrox Press. 1-861003-12-9.

XSLT Programmer's Reference. Wrox Press.

[6] [Fields2000] Duane K. Fields and Mark A. Kolb. Copyright © 2000.1-884777-99-6.
Web Development with JavaServer Pages. Manning Publications Company.

[7] [McLaughlin2000] Brett McLaughlin. Copyright © 2000 O'Reilly & Associates.0-596-00016-2.
Java and XML. O'Reilly & Associates.

[8] [Maruyama1999] Hiroshi Maruyama, Kento Tamura, and Naohiko Uramoto. Copyright © 1999. 0-201-48543-5.
XML and Java : Developing Web Applications. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

[9] [Monson-Haefel2000] Richard Monson-Haefel. Copyright © 2000 O'Reilly & Associates. 1-56592-869-5.
Enterprise JavaBeans. O'Reilly & Associates.

[10] [White1999] Seth White, Maydene Fisher, Rick Cattell, and Graham Hamilton.
Copyright © 1999. 0-2014-3328-1.
JDBC API Tutorial and Reference, Second Edition: Universal Data Access for the Java 2 Platform.
O'Reilly & Associates.

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