IT managers are continually asked to do more with less. Competitive pressures and budgetary constraints compel IT departments to capitalize on the organization's existing infrastructure as well as maximize the value of any extensions or custom development efforts.

This has been especially true in the realm of Web portals, and the barriers to success are all the more challenging. Many organizations that run multiple, heterogeneous portal environments want to deliver pieces of application functionality as portlets that can be consumed through various internal and external portals. The custom development, reconfiguration, and integration work involved in deploying and redeploying portlets inside of multiple application servers can take tens of thousands of dollars worth of IT staff time.

All of which gives the IT industry ample cause to celebrate the long-awaited ratification of two complementary specifications - Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and JSR 168 - as industry standards. WSRP allows for "plug-and-play" of portals, intermediary content aggregation applications, and integration with applications from disparate sources. JSR 168, also known as "Portlets 1.0," is a Java Community Process portlet specification that defines a set of Java APIs to enable interoperability between portals and portlets.

As portal vendors far and wide adopt these new standards and begin to build support for them within their products, the potential for delivering lowcost composite applications to a single, contextual interface through the Web is more of a reality than ever. Building custom applications upon standardsbased logic such as JSR 168 and WSRP will enable developers and IT managers to reuse application portlets in a variety of delivery platforms. This is a key element of a services-oriented architecture (SOA) in which software components can be exposed as services on the network and reused for different applications and purposes.

However, it's also important to recognize that the ability to more flexibly deploy portlet applications by writing standards-compliant linkages is just one piece of a successful portal initiative. Other crucial capabilities - such as how to utilize the portlet, permission it, customize it, and make it available to other portal sites - are handled by the portal management infrastructure itself. And that is where the rubber meets the road in terms of evaluating how capably the different portal software providers will leverage the power of WSRP and JSR 168 for their customers.

The challenge now for the vendors involved is to implement intuitive interfaces that allow organizations to take advantage of standards-compliant portlets within multiple portal sites in a cohesive and consistent way. Developers and IT professionals need to carefully scrutinize every vendor's performance and hold them accountable.

Some of the key criteria for IT organizations to apply in evaluating their current or potential portal software provider's capabilities for achieving interoperability between multiple portals in heterogeneous enterprise environments include:

Ability to incorporate standards-based portlet functionality in a seamless and integrated way: How the vendor incorporates third-party or custom functionality inside the portal management system is as important as the ability to use portlets and portal applications developed in a standards-based way in the first place. Both the end user's and the administrator's experience of the portlets - regardless of their origin - should be completely transparent. Whether they are based on WSRP or JSR 168 standards or a vendor's native API, portlets should behave consistently and deliver key application functionality transparently to end users. Characteristics of this behavior and functionality include the following:
- Customizable permissions based on user and group permissions
- Easy configuration and delivery to end-user pages
- The ability to share portlets between portal sites
- The ability to scale to large enterprise deployments
- The ability for end users to easily personalize their own
portlets and customize where they are used within the portal

The JSR 168 and WSRP industry standards will unquestionably be cornerstones in the foundation of any truly successful portal deployment that aspires to the SOA ideal. However, portal administrators also require a solid infrastructure for creating, customizing, deploying, and reusing portlet application functionality across multiple portal instances. Developers should look for a portal solutions provider with a vision and a long-term track record of developing standards-based portals that encompass all of these building blocks as well.

Published Dec. 1, 2003— Reads 9,167
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About Ed Anuff
As vice president of product strategy, Edward Anuff is shaping Vignette’s go-to-market strategy and maintaining a line of award-winning products and services. He joined Vignette following their acquisition of portal software company Epicentric, where he was chairman, cofounder, and chief strategy officer. Since the acquisition, he has taken an active role in the integration of the companies. He is the author of the Java Sourcebook (J. Wiley and Sons), one of the first books on the Java programming language.