New Approaches to Portletization of Web Applications

Abstract

Portlets are interactive Web mini-applications that can be plugged into a portal. This chapter focuses on “portletizing” existing Web applications, that is, wrapping them as portlets, without requiring any modification. After providing some background on portlet technology, we discuss two kinds of approaches to portletization: automatic and annotation-based. Automatic approaches make use of heuristics to automatically choose the fragments of the Web application pages to be displayed into the space available in the portlet’s window. In turn, in annotation-based approaches, it is the portal administrator who annotates each page of the portletized Web application to specify which fragments should be displayed. Annotation-based approaches also allow to supplement the functionality of the original Web application. Each approach is explained by using a sample scenario based on the same Web application. We also pinpoint the advantages and shortcomings of each approach, and outline future trends in portletization.