Douglass J. Wilson

by MIchael T. Ferro & Douglass J. Wilson Portal has come to mean different things in different situations. Many enterprises approach a portal as a Web site enabling a partitioning of the displayable real estate into separate areas, each area having its associated content personalized to the needs and desires of the site visitor. The content for the discrete areas is dynamically assembled into pages at runtime (see Figure 1). Such a portal could allow for delegated authorship rights of the content in its constituent areas, yet retain centralized management of access rights for portal visitors, centralized control of the overall site, and a host of other administrative features that make a site a portal. This is a very content-centric view of a portal and can be contrasted with a view in which the component sections are conceived of as applications (involving complex a... (more)

WebSphere Journal Cover Story: Support of Composite Apps in WebSphere Portal

In the first article of our three part series, we introduced you to the composite application model and how WebSphere Portal supports it. A composite application is a class of application whose fundamental construction model is the composition of parts or components. It is formed by choosing components from a catalog or palette, placing those components on some design surface, and interconnecting the components to create the behavior desired. Composite applications within WebSphere Portal are based on portlets. Portlets can be considered to be modules of the composition model sinc... (more)

The Support of Composite Applications in WebSphere Portal

What are composite applications and how do they help me? In this three-part series we will introduce the concepts behind a new class of applications called composite applications and explain their need and structure. In this article, we will present a high-level overview of composite applications, the benefit they provide, and how WebSphere Portal supports them. In the next two articles we will explore the WebSphere Portal features that support composite applications in more detail. The term composite application suggests that there is a class of application whose fundamental co... (more)

Support of Composite Applications in WebSphere Portal

In the first of our three-part series, published in November 2004, we introduced the composite application model and how WebSphere Portal supports it. Composite applications are a class of application whose fundamental construction model is the composition of parts or components. They are formed by choosing components or services from a catalog or palette and interconnecting the components to create the behavior desired. The foundation of the composition model is the portal infrastructure, which provides access to user profile information and remote content, the ability to commu... (more)