Programming Portlets: An Introduction Using IBM WebSphere Portal [Paperback]

Ron Lynn (Author), Joey Bernal (Author), Peter Blinstrubas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1931182205 | ISBN-13: 978-1931182201

Essential reading for every software engineer, architect, programmer, system designer, and portlet developer who is confronted with the task of building a portal for their organization, this guide to IBM WebSphere Portal covers the fundamental aspects of the WebSphere portlet API and demonstrates portlet development by example, with working sample portlets throughout the text. The first to specifically address the topic of programming portlets, this book teaches in detail how to create these reusable components while examining the various facilities IBM WebSphere Portal offers. Portal servers deliver rich content, provide collaboration capability, and allow application access that is relevant to an end user via the Internet. A portlet is one small but critical piece of an overall portal composed of many portlets. Portlets can be an article, like in a magazine, or a column, like in a newspaper. WebSphere Portal Server provides a rich and robust horizontal framework for building portals that can meet the needs of any enterprise. Central to the WebSphere Portal framework is the portlet API. The portlet API provides the necessary life cycle methods that developers can use to facilitate the integration of back-end applications and data.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ron Lynn is an IBM software engineer who has worked with the WebSphere portal in various capacities from evangelist to portlet developer. He lives in San Jose, California. Anthony Bernal is a portal architect and specialist with IBM Software Services for WebSphere Portal. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 294 pages
• Publisher: Mc Press (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931182205
• ISBN-13: 978-1931182201
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,082,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony (Joey) Bernal is an Executive IT Specialist with Software Services for Lotus. Sr. Certified with IBM as an I/T Specialist, he has an extensive background in the design and development of Portal and Web Applications. He has led the design and development of many web and client-server applications. His technical knowledge, management and methodology skills, leadership, and attitude have contributed to the successful completion of many major WebSphere and Portal projects.

Joey helps to lead the Software Services team in several technical areas include application architecture, performance, and more. Also he assits with many of the cross-brand challenges that leverage WebSphere Portal. By its inherent nature of being a platform to integrate applications, WebSphere Portal projects require significant cross-brand expertise. All WebSphere Portal projects have products from multiple brands, and many have products from all five brands in the solution. Specifically, Joey works to reduce the challenges presented by the cross-brand nature of WebSphere Portal projects, especially on the use of newer technologies such as the integration of WebSphere Portal with Services Oriented Architectures.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Soo frustrating..., November 11, 2004

By 

I. Gallimore "Ian Gallimore" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Portlets: An Introduction Using IBM WebSphere Portal (Paperback)

I completely agree with the reviewer above - whilst this could and should have easily received 5 stars, I can only give it 3 due to the fact that its full of typos and doesnt come with the code on a CDRom. Normally this might not be a problem, but seeing as the authors have decided to omit large chunks of the source code from the book then there's no actual way of trying out their examples. This is particularly true of their chapter on struts (page 219). Within this chapter, it states "These classes can be downloaded from http://get_theURL, or you can create them yourselves" Obviously this URL is just plain wrong.
The errors with the web addresses are also prevalent towards the end of the struts chapter, where it says: "...file can be downloaded with the rest of the project at http://someURL".

All in all, with a little more proof reading this could have been an excellent book. Failing that, even if they had shipped the source code onto a CDRom then these problems could have been overcome, but with the source code missing or just plain wrong, and together with no support website or even downloadable code then this book is likely to leave the reader very frustrated.
Should one of the book authors see this posting, please, please please, add a link to the source code on your www.mcpressonline.com/ibmpress website....

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Novice to Intermediate View, November 16, 2004

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Portlets: An Introduction Using IBM WebSphere Portal (Paperback)

Portals are the latest thing in web development. (Well, it's the latest thing today, tomorrow is another story with the speed with which the web is developing.) Portals are a group of portlets that form a logically associated group. They allow a common framework to be used with a set of "sub-pages" that can present different but related information. You can get more information about the IBM approach to portals by doing a Google search on Websphere Portal and going to the IBM site.

This book is intended to serve the Novice to Intermediate level programmer. It starts at an elementary level of the "This is a portal." From there it goes on to more advanced subjects.

Perhaps a list of the Table of Contents of the book will serve as good as anything else to give the range of subjects covered:

Introduction
Writing Your First Portlet
Expanding Your First Portlet
Portlet States and Modes
Creating Advanced Portlets
Languages and Markups - Deutsch, Francais, Espanol?
Portal Services
Struts Portal Framework
Security and the Credential Vault.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book, October 27, 2004

By 

LearningCouldHaveBeenSimpler "bookmania" (Greenville, SC , USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Portlets: An Introduction Using IBM WebSphere Portal (Paperback)

I wish the book got published couple of months back. The authors have done an excellent job in providing the information in a simple way. One has to go through the Administration and Developers Guide of Portal Info of IBM to get the same information. Lucid explanation of various terms helps anyone new to Portal(like me) remember the concepts and also when should one use PortletData etc., I like the section under "Enough Struts To Be Dangerous" - I believe every one who is new to Struts should read this. What took couple of days for me to understand Struts (when I was doing it a year ago) was explained in less than 3 pages in clear and concise terms.
I would have given 5 stars to this book but for the following reasons (I think if Amazon allowed it, I would have rated this book as 4.8 on a scale of 5):
a) There is no link to download the code either from the publisher's website (It is also not mentioned in the book).
b) I tried to execute the code available to go to the next page and previous page available from chapter 3 onwards. Apparently it does not go past the 2 nd page. I do not know whether I have missed something in entering the code. Though this might not be necessary, I wish if one could have access to the code, they might not suffer much.
c) In the Chapter 9 (page no : 228) one talks about blue circles in the fig 9.1 while the picture is in black and white.