Customer Reviews

Programming Portlets: An Introduction Using IBM WebSphere Portal

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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....

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.

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.

This was no doubt an excellent introduction to both Portlets and WebSphere Portal several years ago, but it's showing its age. It describes JSR-168 as "still a very young standard" so it uses the WebSphere API throughout. The current version of WebSphere supports the JSR. If your application is going to stick with the IBM API then this is still a good tutorial, but if you want more JSR-168 training I'd recommend another introductory level book.

Interesting but doesn't go deep enough to my point of view when things starts to be challenging. May be, i should have realized that the title contains the word "introduction to". I don't regret, and now i'm ready for a more in depth book. Another thing i regret, is that this book is a bit outdated, since it refers to portal 5 and i'm planning to be using portal 6.

Once again Joey and company have provided a much needed book to assist developers in programming portlets. This book is a terrific complement to "Mastering WebSphere Portal". It provides the reader with best practices and discusses advance subjects such as dynamic portlet menus and a detail discussion on enabling portlets to support multiple languages and markups. Highly recommend this book.