JBoss Portal Server Development Book Review

One Minute Bottom Line

JBoss Portal Server Development is highly recommended. In this book you will find an in-depth coverage of all the topics needed to implement a portal using JBoss Portal.

Review

In the first chapter, JBoss Portal Server Development provides a good overview about all portal types (B2B,B2C,B2E), and then continues to introduce all the components needed to understand all about the portals world.

It is better if the reader has skills about portlet or JSF, but I think this book can be used easily by portal newbie developers too.

I would certainly appreciate this book more if there was a deeper section about architectural design and interfaces for system integration problems, but for now there are only some definitions.
The focus of the book is the development process and Ramanujam Rao has reached this goal.

One of the most important points in delivering  an enterprise portal dedicated to users, customer or internal employees is the customization of user interfaces with custom logos, custom layouts and custom themes. This book describes  how to customize all you need to make easy the portal experience, in a dedicated chapter. In fact we can find how to accomplish this goal modifying XML and JSP layouts.

Another chapter has described how to use JBoss Portal CMS to manage contents to deliver directly on the portal using CMSPortlets available and ready to use instanceable objects.

An interesting chapter is based on a guide to implement an example application using JBoss Seam framework, one of the latest appreciated JBoss works.

There are many other interesting chapters about database interface, portal identity management, portal security, WSRP, portlet filtering and portlet coordination. Below you can see the table of all the contents of the book:

• Chapter 1: Portals and Portal Servers
• Chapter 2: Getting Started with JBoss Portal
• Chapter 3: Saying Hello with a Portlet
• Chapter 4: Managing the View
• Chapter 5: Personalizing Our Portal Experience
• Chapter 6: Portals and AJAX
• Chapter 7: Databases and Portal
• Chapter 8: Managing Content in Portal
• Chapter 9: Portal Security
• Chapter 10: Web Services and Portlets
• Chapter 11: Portlet Coordination and Filters

I also liked the introduction of the beneficial use of Ajax using the latest portlet specification (JSR-268), and there is a comparison paragraph about the integration of Ajax with the old portlet specification (JSR-168).