Monday, October 17, 2011

Portal servers covered in Portlets in Action

Portlets in Action uses Liferay 6.0.5 as the reference portal server but it contains additional details for Glassfish (with OpenPortal Portlet Container), Jetspeed and a dedicated appendix for creating a web portal using GateIn Portal. As Liferay has been used as reference, Chapter 1 provides a quick start to Liferay Portal, and as you go through remaining chapters of the book, you'll find more details about Liferay. Chapter 5 is dedicated to Liferay, and it shows how to build a complete web portal in Liferay.

The book assumes that readers have no prior experience working with Liferay, GateIn or Jetspeed servers, Spring, Ajax, Comet, Hibernate, Spring Portlet MVC, and other related technologies. So, the book is for  developers new to Java Portlet technology and for experienced portal architects.

The book attempts to compare features offered by Liferay, Glassfish (with OpenPortal Portlet Container) and Jetspeed, so that readers get a better idea about the portal servers. At the heart of the book is the Spring Portlet MVC Framework, which you can use to simplify portlet development. Real world portlet development projects require using Spring Portlet MVC, Ajax, Comet (Reverse Ajax), WSRP, Hibernate or Spring JDBC, AOP, Inter-portlet communication using different mechanisms, Personalization, JSR 303 for validation, and so on.

Some of the book examples have been tailored for GateIn, and you can find them here: http://code.google.com/p/portletsinaction-gatein/

Liferay examples are located here: http://code.google.com/p/portletsinaction/downloads/list