Portlets in Action Book Review
ISBN: 9781935182542
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One Minute Bottom Line
| How well do you know portal standards? How can you use portal to develop your portal applications? Portlets in Action is a book that gives you, portal newcomers and those who are experienced, valuable details and examples to help guide you through building complex portal applications based on portlet technology. This Book has examples for both Liferay and GateIn portals. I am writing this review on behalf of the GateIn portal team. |
Review
Portal is a concept, a technology that is not new to those who are developing portal applications. Nobody can deny its usefulness for developing portal applications. Features such as authentication, personalization, content aggregation, customization, etc. allow us to completely develop our complex portal applications on the existing portlet technology.
Portal guides are often not detailed enough. In "Portlets in Action",
Ashish Sarin gives us great detail. He sumarizes his portal development experiences and walks us through real-world requirements.
Sarin covers basic concepts such as portal, portlet, portlet
container, portlet lifecycle, etc. to help both newcomers and those who
are experienced with portal to be able to play their portlets on
the portal. Theory is integrated with detailed, specific examples of
each business requirement in order to give readers relevant techniques
for their specific purposes.
Popular web technologies like Spring portlet MVC, Tag library, Hibernate, Ajax, DOJO, DWR, JQuery,
etc. are each integrated into the examples. More advanced topics like
communication with other portlets, web services for remote portlets,
porting web applications to portlets using portlet bridges that help with migrating applications, are all covered in individual chapters.
Sarin also includes common examples that can be run on all
of the popular portals. He always follows the standards used in portals
JSR-286. It is not easy to be compatable with everything, but Sarin has
done a large part of this successfully. Default examples are explained
and illustrated for the Liferay portal and are also tested on the
GateIn portal.
This book is still in the MEAP version and does not give detailed features of each specific portal. The author does, however, introduce some individual features, such as role-based security in GateIn and Liferay.
I find this book valuable for
web developers interested in using powerful support to build web applications based on portal.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
