Building Portals with the Java Portlet API (Expert's Voice)

Rating:
Summary: Natural progression from JSP/Servlets
Review: Many companies have recognised the need for portals to provide an easy way for users to get at corporate information, in a way controlled by the company. Inevitably, there has been a writing of APIs to regularise what a portal is. Here, our authors give this, in the context of J2EE and the latest Java.

The book explains how to use the Java Portal API. It shows a portal as a container of portlets. Each portlet is a wrapper around some single coherent function. At least, that is the ideal!

You will be greatly eased in understanding what is offered if you have already written Java Servlets and JSPs. The Portal API and its recommended usage were deliberately written to mimic those, as much as possible. There is really nothing difficult here.

Plus, put simply, if you can understand Servlets and JSPs, it strongly behooves you to upgrade your skill set and learn about portals. You have to keep moving forward. If only because there are programmers in India (and elsewhere) actively commoditising your current skill set. Just a few steps behind you. So perhaps try this book and keep going.

Rating:
Summary: Solid intro to portals
Review: Portals are becoming more popular as companies are looking for a single web-based entry point into their various applications. Java provides a standard portal model with JSR 168. This book is a thorough introduction into JSR 168 that will help get portal developers up to speed into this relatively new specification.

The book starts with an excellent introduction into developing portlets. The first seven chapters cover all the details of developing portlets. Response and request objects are covered in detail. The portlet life cycle is clearly explained. Deployment descriptors are discussed. Integrating with Servlets and JSPs is described. The remainder of the book covers more advanced topics. Anyone working with a portal knows the problems with providing single sign-on to multiple applications. The authors discuss this issue giving several examples. The authors cover syndication, searching, personalization, web services, content management, and more.

My only complaint with the book is that it uses the Apache Pluto portal, which is not in final release yet. Pluto is an open source portal but it is complicated to distribute content to it (you are forced to use Maven). When the book explains how to distribute portlets to Pluto it gets a little confusing because the authors need to explain multiple configuration files, some of which are exclusive to Pluto. Other than this one problem, the book gives a solid introduction to developing a portal providing detailed information of both the basics and many advanced concepts. Clearly the authors understand portal development and know how to pass that information on to their readers.

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Summary: A mock up of a book on portlets...
Review: The Java portlet API is one of the less known and actively studied by developers due to the absence of a stable, well documented reference implementation. So a good book on the subjct would be sorely needed but this text is not up to the challenge. It is written by a couple geeks with clearly no inclination or talent for teaching who manage to express even the simplest concept in complicated ways. That maybe could be forgiven, but they also do not seem to have a really deep understanding of the subject. For all but the most general notions and , especially important, for all the configuration , intallation and deployment nuisances you are left on your own. We need a good book covering IN DETAIL pluto and especially Jetspeed 2. Don't waste you money with this mock up of a book, wait for a better title.

Rating:
Summary: Building Portals with the Java Portlet API
Review: This book provides an introductory level overview of the entire Portlet development process from tools installation to deployment. Some topics, like RSS, are given short shrift, but overall the topic coverage is consistent. The text is well written and easy to read, graphics and illustrations are used sparingly and to great effect.

Enough time is spent on the introduction, basic concepts and the life cycle of a portlet to create a firm basis of understanding to layer the technical concepts on. That is what you want from a book like this and it delivers. This book is definitely worth a look for anyone looking to build portlets on the Java Portlet API.

Rating:
Summary: For Professionals By Professionals
Review: This should not be your first book on computers. It's not a beginners guide to FrontPage or something like that. On the other hand, if you've been assigned a portal project or are wanting to upgrade your skills at a professional level, this just may well be the book for you.

This book presumes that you have some level of expertise at the Java Servlet level. That means that Java, Java Server Pages, Apache/Pluto, shouldn't be totally unknown to you. In fact, you should have Pluto running on you machine when you start.

Having said that, then this book provides an excellent and clear introduction to portals. It further assumes that you may have to integrate your existing application (Oh wouldn't it be nice to start clean.) into a portal environment and discusses how to do this at length. If portals are your new thing, you won't go wrong by starting here.