Rating: 
Summary: Incomplete look at Portal development
Review: There seems to be a new breed of technical cookbook book that involves throwing a lot of different technologies into a stew and hoping that what comes out is flavorful. Unfortunately, the result is more often than not, a less than tasty meal. This book is a prime example. Although it claims to be a guide to portal development using Java, it is mainly a bare bones discussion of lots of open source technologies without tying them together.The book starts with an introduction to the Java Portlet API. This should be the heart of the book but in 35 pages we get a glance at some aspects of portals and some tables that give us a little on what but virtually nothing on how or why. Thinking that this was simply a quick introduction I wasn't too let down but then the book moves on to short chapters on Lucene, Apache James, Apache OJB, and Jakarta Slide. The book talks about security, planning, JavaScript, deployment, web services, etc. The one thing that is lacking is a feel for how this should all fit together within the Portlet API. Taking each chapter by itself, some of them are good while others cover little more than the surface of each topic. Overall, the book fails to be a guide to developing a portal using Java. It should be considered as a series of articles dealing with different aspects of portal development but without any real connection.
Rating:
Summary: Incomplete look at Portal development
Review: There seems to be a new breed of technical cookbook book that involves throwing a lot of different technologies into a stew and hoping that what comes out is flavorful. Unfortunately, the result is more often than not, a less than tasty meal. This book is a prime example. Although it claims to be a guide to portal development using Java, it is mainly a bare bones discussion of lots of open source technologies without tying them together. The book starts with an introduction to the Java Portlet API. This should be the heart of the book but in 35 pages we get a glance at some aspects of portals and some tables that give us a little on what but virtually nothing on how or why. Thinking that this was simply a quick introduction I wasn't too let down but then the book moves on to short chapters on Lucene, Apache James, Apache OJB, and Jakarta Slide. The book talks about security, planning, JavaScript, deployment, web services, etc. The one thing that is lacking is a feel for how this should all fit together within the Portlet API. Taking each chapter by itself, some of them are good while others cover little more than the surface of each topic. Overall, the book fails to be a guide to developing a portal using Java. It should be considered as a series of articles dealing with different aspects of portal development but without any real connection.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrific Book, Reviews mis-leading! Bonus Chapter Rocks!
Review: This book covers JSR-168 portal development extremely well and provides developers with great insight about Open-Source technologies that are commonly used within portals. Some of the reviewers complaints are pretty odd and don't hold much weight once you actually read and use the book. The authors even went through the trouble of including a bonus chapter on Pluto which is located on the Wrox web site. The URL is:
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Rating:
Summary: Loaded with Knowledge!!!
Review: This book covers JSR168 in great detail and also shows the reader how to use some of the most popular open source tools on the market. These tools are geared towards what a programmer might need for portal development. Terrific book! I highly recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: A pretty decent book
Review: This book is probably the most thorough portal book that has been published to date. Other books are filled with high-minded thoughts on how to build a portal but don't have relevant content on how portals should be developed in the real-world. I'm not saying that this book is perfect, i think that a finished portal product in the end with all of the components described in the book integrated into a portal application would have been nice, but the authors did a fine job of describing some important Open-source tools used in portlets and how these individual components can be "portlet-tized" for production. My guess is that the authors were constrained by the late release of JSR specification and the Open-source tools that incorporated them into a portal framework, which explains the bonus chapter that is posted on the Wrox website rather than being integrated into the book itself.
The criticisms of this book range from exaggerated to imbecilic. The hyperbolic "cookbook" claims are somewhat accurate in that the book could of been better organized as a finished portal product, but idiotic when describing this book as failing to serve as a proper guide for organizing components for portal development. In the real-world, portals are supposed to provide a unified view of disparate components, which sounds like a lot of "different technologies" being placed in a stew, to say that a portal book being written in some other fashion is just plain stupid. I contend that the "finished product" is good, because the book introduces a potpourri of web technologies and describes quite sufficiently in the book and in their bonus chapter how to integrate web components into a JSR-168 compliant portlet for deployment.
The imbecilic claims about the title misrepresenting the book contents concerning Jetspeed just tells me that the critic does not know how to read a book title, and the swipe about this book as an amalgamation of open-source tools without much content tells me that this person would probably prefer one of those "pea-brained" tomes with simplistic examples and mind-numbing API referrences...ugh.
This book is chock full of examples of how a portal should be developed with excellent examples on how to build portlets. Chapter 7 has an great example of the implementation of dom4j for a portal content component that reads an XML taxonomy and renders links in a web application for easy navigation, which i currently use with a high profile customer portal implementation. Chapter 9 does a nice job of explaining how a simple web component can be wrapped in JSR-168 API's to create a standard portlet component that can be easily ported to the eXo platform. Lastly, Chapter 8 does a great job in describing how Javascript can be crafted to serve client-side needs for your portal deployments considering that not all processing needs to be performed on the backend.
An important point to take away from this book is that not everyone needs to deploy their applications inside the JSR-168 wrapper classes to address knowledge dissemination needs in a portal to serve their customers, but that individual components can be brought together in a web application without "portlet-izing" them to provide a unified view of knowledge. This book is a solid 4 out of 5, but i gave it a score of 5 to offset some of the moronic statements and scores that were critical of this fine book.
Rating: 
Summary: Authors trying to cash in on new technology...good intro tho
Review: While the book has a good introduction about JSR 168, it doesn't go into too much detail considering that this is a Professional series book. They gloss over the products and do not talk about pitfalls and gotchas. They obviously know what they are talking about... but you probably want to wait for the next wave of Portal technology books.
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