Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide [Paperback]

W. Clay Richardson (Author), Donald Avondolio (Author), Joe Vitale (Author), Peter Len (Author), Kevin T. Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471469513 | ISBN-13: 978-0471469513 | Publication Date: February 27, 2004 | Edition: 1

What is this book about?

Open source technology enables you to build customized enterprise portal frameworks with more flexibility and fewer limitations. This book explains the fundamentals of a powerful set of open source tools and shows you how to use them.

An outstanding team of authors provides a complete tutorial and reference guide to Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, and Slide, taking you step-by-step through constructing and deploying portal applications. You trace the anatomy of a search engine and understand the Lucene query syntax, set up Apache James configuration for a variety of servers, explore object to relational mapping concepts with Jakarta OJB, and acquire many other skills necessary to create J2EE portals uniquely suited to the needs of your organization.

Loaded with code-intensive examples of portal applications, this book offers you the know-how to free your development process from the restrictions of pre-packaged solutions.

What does this book cover?

Here's what you will learn in this book:

• How to evaluate business requirements and plan the portal
• How to develop an effective browser environment
• How to provide a search engine, messaging, database inquiry, and content management services in an integrated portal application
• How to develop Web services for the portal
• How to monitor, test, and administer the portal
• How to create portlet applications compliant with the Java Portlet API
• How to reduce the possibility of errors while managing the portal to accommodate change
• How to plan for the next generation application portal

Who is this book for?

This book is for professional Java developers who have some experience in portal development and want to take advantage of the options offered by open source tools.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Open source technology enables you to build customized enterprise portal frameworks with more flexibility and fewer limitations. This book explains the fundamentals of a powerful set of open source tools and shows you how to use them.

An outstanding team of authors provides a complete tutorial and reference guide to Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, and Slide, taking you step by step through constructing and deploying portal applications. You will trace the anatomy of a search engine and understand the Lucene query syntax, set up Apache James configuration for a variety of servers, explore object to relational mapping concepts with Jakarta OJB, and acquire many other skills necessary to create J2EE™ portals uniquely suited to the needs of your organization.

Loaded with code-intensive examples of portal applications, this volume offers you the know-how to free your development process from the restrictions of pre-packaged solutions.

What you will learn from this book

• How to evaluate business requirements and plan the portal
• How to develop an effective browser environment
• How to provide a search engine, messaging, database inquiry, and content management services in an integrated portal application
• How to develop Web services for the portal
• How to monitor, test, and administer the portal
• How to create portlet applications compliant with the Java Portlet API
• How to reduce the possibility of errors while managing the portal to accommodate change
• How to plan for the next generation application portal

Who this book is for

This book is for professional Java developers who have some experience in portal development and want to take advantage of the options offered by open source tools.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

W. Clay Richardson is a software consultant specializing in distributed solutions, particularly portal solutions. He has fielded multiple open-source Web and portal solutions, serving in roles ranging from senior architect to development lead. He is a co-author of More Java Pitfalls, also published by Wiley & Sons. As an adjunct professor of computer science for Virginia Tech, he teaches graduate-level coursework in object-oriented development with Java. He holds degrees from Virginia Tech and the Virginia Military Institute.

Donald Avondolio is a software consultant with over seventeen years of experience developing and deploying enterprise applications. He began his career in the aerospace industry developing programs for flight simulators, and later became an independent contractor, crafting healthcare middleware and low-level device drivers for an assortment of mechanical devices. Most recently, he has built e-commerce applications for numerous high-profile companies, including The Home Depot, Federal Computer Week, the U.S. Postal Service, and General Electric. He is currently a technical architect and developer on several portal deployments. Don also serves as an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, where he teaches progressive object-oriented design and development methodologies, with an emphasis on patterns.

Joe Vitale has been working with the latest cutting-edge Java technology intensely. His most recent focus has been on Java portals and object-relational mapping tools. One of these projects was writing a content management system that contained role-based authentication of users and the capability for users to upload, delete, and manage files, and secure resources. The whole system was designed to plug right into a portal’s interface and enable the portal to directly communicate with it to obtain its resources. Object-relational mapping technologies have also been a focus, using Apache’s Object Relational Bridge (OJB).

Peter Len has over seven years’ experience performing Web-based and Java application development in a client-server environment. He has designed, coded, and implemented data and Web site components for each aspect of a three-tier architecture. Mr. Len has been developing with Java for over five years and has recently been involved with portal and Web-service development. He holds a master’s degree in both international affairs and computer information systems.

Kevin T. Smith is a technical director and principal software architect at McDonald Bradley, Inc., where he develops security solutions for Web service–based systems. He has focused his career on building enterprise solutions based on open-source tools. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science, software systems engineering, and information security. He has taught undergraduate courses in computer science, given technical presentations on Web services and Java programming at numerous technology conferences, and authored several technical books, including Essential XUL Programming (Wiley 2001), More Java Pitfalls (Wiley 2003), and The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management (Wiley 2003).

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (February 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471469513
• ISBN-13: 978-0471469513
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,913,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete look at Portal development, June 22, 2004

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide (Paperback)

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just like a Poorly Architeted Portal - A Framework without Much Substance, August 5, 2005

By 

Dr. Karl N.-Y. Zhang (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide (Paperback)

Enterprise portal based on Portlet is very flexible for rapid development. A good practice is to plug-in quickly a variety of portlets as placeholders to compose a mock-up portal as the baseline for further detailed discussion with stakeholders. Of course, all the parties involved know that the mock-up presented is still a mock-up and they expect there is a production release at the end.

This book is also a mockup, though we readers did not know this until we paid this book as the final deliverable.

This book has two parts. The first part, Open Source Portals, contains 6 chapters. Chapter 1, The Java Portlet API (JSR 168), mainly lists lengthy attribute names and descriptions for CSS Style Definitions and for User Information Attributes, without much explanation. Much better material may be found online just a google away. Many pages are given to the code of a sample portlet. The explanation is as much as the comments made by poor programmer, almost none. Why do we readers have to pay in order to have the pleasure to read poorly commented coding? The sample is built upon Apache Lucene API, though it has not been introduced at this stage at all.

The remaining 5 chapters in the first part introduce several subjects that may be used to support a portal development, researching with Lucene, messaging with Apache James (for mail), object to relational mapping with Apache OJB, content management with Jakarta's Slide, portal security. The authors take these pieces of the components of their portal framework. A problem with this book is that the authors keep introduce a large amount of terminologies and software components without much insight. For instance, they never bother to explain why they use Apache OJB in their portal framework. Isn't Hibernate also a popular O-R mapping tool? I wish the authors explained to us other alternatives and at least some hints of why they choose certain open source tools instead of the others in portal development. This is particular important for using open source tools since there are often many alternatives.

The second part is titled How to Build a Portal. Again, you will discover many placeholders without much substance. For instance, under Design Pattern Consideration in Your Portal, nine standard design patterns are presented, several lines of description for each. The authors just do not bother to explain why they consider these 9 patterns are important for portal development and other are not, or they merely provides a partial list to demonstrate design patterns are still important to portal development as it is for any other development. I will give you another example here. Chapter is devoted to Effective Client-Side Development Using JavaScript. The coverage here is just common for any web development. I do not understand why the authors make this subject an entire chapter, in particular since this book covers a large amount of subjects in a moderate 400 pages, and in particular some fundamental subjects are still missing, such as the coverage of portal servers/containers.

I am not kidding. Open source portal/containers are not covered much in this book for Professional Portal development. Open source portal servers are briefly mentioned in the introductory part in about one page, each in several lines. Apache Jakarta Pluto is covered in a bonus chapter on the book's companion Web site. Apache Jakarta Jetspeed is mentioned in 7 linesJ. Liferay Enterprise Portal is introduced in 15 lines. This books give more coverage on EXo Portal. is introduced in 8 lines and it is introduced briefly again at Chapter 9, when a moderate Portlet is demonstrated.

According to the publisher, "An outstanding team of authors provides a complete tutorial and reference guide to Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, and Slide, taking you step-by-step through constructing and deploying portal applications." The book fails to deliver this promise.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Portlet stew, December 24, 2004

By 

Riccardo Audano (Chiavari, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide (Paperback)

As other reviewers have noted, this is far from being a professional (ie advanced) guide to portal development in Java. It is more of strange mix of articles and brief tutorials (of the kind that you might find on the net) vaguely related to portlet technology. A pitiful attempt to cash in on the first wave of a new and poorly known technology.