Developing portlets

Console modules are portlets that run in the portlet container of WebSphere Application Server.

Integrated Solutions Console supports console modules written to the Java Portlet Specification. A packaged console module WAR file contains one or more portlets or reuses portlets from other modules. According to the JSR 168 specification, a portlet is a Java technology based Web component, managed by a portlet container, that processes requests and generates content that contributes to the overall portal page. Portlets share many of the same characteristics as servlets. However, portlets also exhibit differences. For example, portlets cannot set HTTP headers and can contribute only markup fragments to the portal page. The portlet specification leverages the functionality of the servlet specification as much as possible, and many parts of the Java Portlet Specification have been modeled after the servlet specification.

The application server includes a JSR 168-compliant portlet container to support deploying and running console modules in Integrated Solutions Console. The JSR 168 portlet container relies on the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) architecture implemented by the application server. Consequently, an Integrated Solutions Console module and its portlets are packaged and deployed similar to Java EE Web applications. In addition to the Web application descriptor and the portlet descriptor, the WAR file for an Integrated Solutions Console module includes additional descriptors needed to deploy the application to a console installation.

The following Web resources can be useful for learning more about portlet development.

Table 1. Web resources on portlet development. The following table describes Web resources for portlet development.
Resource Web site URL
Portlet Specification 1.0 http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/168.jsp
Portlet Specification 2.0 http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=286
WebSphere Portal Zone http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/portal/
Best practices: Developing portlets using JSR 168 and WebSphere Portal http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0403_hepper/0403_hepper.html
WebSphere Portal external newsgroup news://news.software.ibm.com/ibm.software.websphere.portal-server
Develop a Faces JSR 168 portlet using IBM Rational Application Developer 6.0 for autonomic computing http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/ac-dw-ac-jsfisc-i.html
Introduction to JSR 168 - The Portlet Specification http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/index.html



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