Portal的简单介绍

什么是Portal?

A server to aggregate content
A scalable infrastructure
A framework to build portal components and extensions

The main job of a portal is to aggregate content and functionality.

这句话把Portal的最基本要实现的目标写了出来。“集合内容和功能”。在这里内容是指的很广泛的一个概念，内容可以EIS，也可以是文件服务器，等等是个非常复杂和广泛的内容。“功能”，为了实现功能的聚合，framework，scalable infrastructure是portal的重要特性。

 

Personalization enables the portal to deliver user-specific information targeting a
user based on their unique information

 

Customization allows the user to
organize the look and feel of the portal to suit their individual needs and tastes.

 

Portal发展的四个里程

 1。The first portals, known as first generation portals, were focused on providing static Web content, Web documents and live feeds.

2。Second generation portals are first generation portals with added features such as personalized, customized content and a search capability but are often a manual roll-your-own process.

3。Collaboration portals provide the ability for teams to work in a virtual office. They provide content management services, the mining and organization of related information, along with collaborative services that allow users to chat, e-mail,share calendars and define user communities.

4。This involves integration with legacy applications at the component level.They take portals beyond the corporate boundaries for use by employees,suppliers and customers. They also provide access from multiple types ofIBM WebSphere Portal Toolkit V5 devices to address the diverse user communities in need of services.

重点是第四点，我是这么理解的，功能构件化，组件化，portal的架构特点保证了用户可以二次开发和使用别人开发的组件。客户端的多样化，除了可以满足不同种类的用户，也可以满足不同客户端的访问要求。

 

关于Portal和Portlet的关系，我觉得下面这段话写的比较好。

Portlets are similar to Windows applications in that they present their contents in a window-like display on a portal page. Like a Windows application, the portlet window has a title bar which contains controls,allowing the users to expand (maximize) and shrink (minimize) the application.
Portal就像windows一样，而portlet就像windows中开发的应用程序，应用程序实现一定的功能，不过它要调用windows api来实现这些功能，这包括应用程序的显示，事件的处理，数据处理等等。同样道理，portlet可以实现一些业务流程和功能，但是它是建立在portal的基础上的，才能被用户正常使用。

 The portal infrastructure provides the core sets of services required by the portlets,including:

Access to user profile information

A framework for portlets to participate in events

A framework to communicate with other portlets

Access to remote content

Access to credentials

A framework for storing persistent data.

以WCM Authoring Portlet为例，它需要访问操作用户的信息，比如在编辑历史，编辑权限方面就需要Portal向它提供用户管理的接口。WCM Authoring中有许多操作，这些事件需要portal提供的事件监听体系来处理这些事件。如何存储内容也需要portal来提供一定的接口，WCM主要使用的是JCR。

Local Rendering Portlet,Remote Rendering Portlet需要Access to remote content，A framework to communicate with other portlets，Access to credentials来实现内容的rendering.