What Is a Portal?

You have already encountered a web portal if you’ve used Yahoo!—one of the world’s bestknown and most-used portals. Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Music each aggregate the contents provided by their partners. This is exactly what a portal does: it provides a single point of entry to widely distributed information on the web, and itoffers a unified way to access that diverse information.Some portals allow users to decide what they want to display on their portal pages. Inmany of these cases, the portal designer will customize the user’s page contents and generate them dynamically. Regardless of whether the customization is done by the portal designer orthe user, portals provide an easy way to configure desired content on a personal web page.Plus, portals provide a consistent look and feel. Users can take advantage of diverse applicationsin the same manner, making it easy for them to access information from various sources.Now let’s look at the formal definition of a “portal.” If you search for “portal definition”on Google, you’ll pull up several definitions that all convey the same meaning. Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal), the popular free encyclopedia, provides thefollowing definition:

A web portal is a site that provides a single function via a web page or site. Web portalsoften function as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web. Portals presentinformation from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the search enginestandard, web portals offer other services such as e‑mail, news, stock prices, infotainment,and other features. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistentlook and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwisewould have been different entities altogether.

 Here’s another definition from Sun Microsystems, which defines “portal” in its JavaPortlet Specifications (JSR 286) as follows:A portal is a web-based application that commonly provides personalization, authentication,[and] content aggregation from different sources and hosts the presentationlayer of information systems.

 This definition states that a portal is a kind of web application that aggregates contentfrom different sources—web sites or web applications. The content generated by these websites can be static or dynamic. For example, a sports-related portal might generate a web pagethat aggregates and presents information from several sports web sites. If a user decides togather further information from one of the displayed web sites, she can simply visit that website by navigating to it from the portal page. After doing that, she can return to the portal pagewith ease and continue navigating to the other web sites if desired.

Some of the displayed web sites might require the user to sign on, in which case a portalcan offer the capability of single sign-on. Single sign-on means that once the portal authenticatesthe user, it applies the same credentials to all the applications displayed on the portalpage so that the user can access them. In some cases, a portal simply communicates to anaggregated application that the user is authenticated, and the application trusts that.As stated in the Sun Microsystems definition, a portal provides personalization,whereby the user can decide what applications should be initially displayed on the personalportal page. The user can configure this page any time by adding and removing differentapplications.Different web sites offer several other definitions, all of which describe portals as usercustomizableweb sites that serve as gateways to diversified content arising from varioussources. However, these definitions neglect to describe an important feature of today’s portals:

Generally, these new types of portals give users tools and applications to create sites forsocial networking and collaboration. I’ll describe one such portal, uPortal, later in this chapter.The Liferay portal that we’ll explore also falls into this new category of portals.Now that I’ve defined what a web portal is, I’ll discuss two real-life examples: Yahoo! andGoogle.

Example Portal: Yahoo!

To understand what a portal is and how to customize its contents, look at what Yahoo! providesto a user. When you open the Yahoo! web site, you see a screen similar to the one shownin Figure 1-1, assuming that you are in the United States (http://us.yahoo.com).

On the right-hand side, you will see the Page Options drop-down menu. One of theoptions in the drop-down list is Try My Yahoo!, which allows you to customize your Yahoo!page (see Figure 1-2).

Aggregating Contents

At the top of the page, you will find a toolbar that allows you to add content to the page andchange its appearance. When you click the Add Content menu option, you will see a list ofoptions as shown in Figure 1-3.

Click the desired item in the displayed list to add it to your page. Before adding an item,you can preview it by hovering the mouse over it and clicking the Show Preview link that’s displayed.You can add multiple items to the page.Once you’ve added an item, you can relocate it on the page simply by selecting it anddragging it to the desired position. You can remove any of the added or existing items from thepage by clicking the “x” symbol shown in the top-right corner of each. After deleting the undesireditems, you can relocate the remaining items to your liking.Once you’ve finished adding items to your page, click the I’m Done button to return tofull-page view. You’ve just configured the entry-point page that provides easy, uniform accessto several distributed applications on the web.Now, you’ll change the page’s appearance—its look and feel.

Changing Look and Feel

Clicking the Change Appearance menu option opens the screen shown in Figure 1-4.

Here, you will find options for changing the color, layout, font size, and search-boxsize. Select the color of your choice from the displayed colors. You can also select textures,environments, and so on from the displayed menu choices. To change the layout, click theChange Layout option and select the size and number of columns from the choices offered.After selecting a different column layout, you might want to rearrange the display items toyour liking. Likewise, you can configure font size and search-box size by clicking the respectivemenu choices.Try out the other configuration options. If you want your changes to persist, you shouldsign on before making them.You’ve used a portal that lets the user aggregate desired home-page content and you’veset the page’s look and feel. Now consider Google, another popular portal in the market.

Kinds of Portals

Wikipedia classifies portals into several different types:

• Personal portals

• Academic portals

• Regional web portals

• Government web portals

• Corporate web portals

• Domain-specific portals

• Sports portals

These classifications are essentially based on the use of each portal type.

Personal Portals:

A personal portal is a portal that an individual can customize to meet his or her requirementsand suit his or her tastes. Examples of these include My Yahoo! and iGoogle, whichyou saw earlier in this chapter. These portals are easily customizable, and the customizationinformation is stored in the individual’s user account. A user needs to log on to the accountto regenerate the personalized page. A personal portal generally aggregates the contents providedby several distributed applications hosted by various worldwide sources, but it doesn’tnecessarily meet business-driven requirements such as support for various kinds of inputdevices like PDAs, cell phones, and so on.These kinds of portals are best if you are not satisfied with the preconfigured portals onthe web and you’d like to create customized pages with the look and feel of your choice.Academic PortalsAn academic portal addresses the needs of academicians. An example of a typical academicportal is uPortal (http://www.uportal.org/), a sharable portal under development. UnlikeYahoo! and Google, uPortal is portal software. Whereas Yahoo! and Google provide customizableportal sites, uPortal provides a platform for collaboration. Several institutions of highereducation have joined together to create uPortal, which is freely downloadable and based onstandard technologies such as Java, XML, JSP, and J2EE. It supports collaboration with thehelp of several community tools such as chat, forums, surveys, and so on. It basically provides“an abridged and customized version” of the campus web presence.Another example of an academic portal is the Austrian Academic Portal (http://www.portal.ac.at/index-en.html). This portal—a straightforward portal site like Yahoo! andGoogle—is a gateway to Austrian institutions that teach science and humanities, research,education, and culture. Anybody wishing to pursue studies in Austria in the specified fieldswould find this portal useful.You’ll find several such academic portals for each country. For example, if you wish toget information on education in Switzerland, you can visit the education portal SWITCH (http://www.switch.ch/).

Regional Web Portals

A regional web portal provides information pertinent to a specific geographic location. Suchinformation might consist of weather forecasts, street maps, local news, and shopping. Onesuch popular regional web portal in India is Rediff (http://www.rediff.com). It providesregional information related to travel, local news, stocks, matrimony, Bollywood, and so on.A similar regional portal for China is SINA (http://www.sina.com), which is availablein both Chinese and English. It offers information about business, sports, lifestyle, andentertainment. Other countries and regions within countries offer portals, such as Greece(http://www.in.gr) and the South East of England (http://www.southeastofengland.com/).The former targets only users who read Greek.Government Web PortalsMany governments worldwide provide portals for their citizens. One such portal is TheNational Portal of India (http://india.gov.in), which provides useful government-relatedinformation to its residents, information for entrepreneurs who are setting up businesses inIndia, and tourist information for visitors and students.A portal hosting government-related information for the United States is USA.gov(http://www.usa.gov). This portal provides information for citizens, businesses and not-forprofitorganizations, government employees, and visitors. Because the United States is a largecountry, many of its states have set up their own regional portals, such as Clark County Now,A Regional Portal for East Central Illinois (http://www.clarkcountynow.com) and the State ofIllinois Business Portal (http://www.business.illinois.gov).Corporate Web PortalsCorporate web portals, also known as intranet portals, have become a widely accepted standardamong corporations. These corporate intranets provide a consolidated view of thecompany’s information to its employees and often allow employees to personalize and customizethe site’s content display.Today’s corporate portals also allow the creation and publication of workflows thatfacilitate better collaboration among the company’s divisions. They permit the creationof wikis that allow the users to share knowledge, thereby increasing the company’s overallproductivity. Generally, these portals provide single sign-on to its employees; once a user isauthenticated at the entry point, he can navigate the organization’s departments using theprivileges assigned to the specific login role.Such corporate web portals might expose part of their contents to external users throughthe Internet. In such cases, these portals are called extranet portals.Corporate web portals for big companies are likely hosted on the company’s internalservers; portals for smaller organizations might be hosted on external servers supplied by serviceproviders.

Domain-Specific Portals

Portals geared toward a particular industry are called domain-specific portals. For example,a portal for real-estate agents brings a region’s agents to a single site and allows consumers to buy and sell their properties. A single real-estate agent could even create a portal for facilitatingthe buying and selling of real estate.Examples of real-estate portals in the U.S.A. include HomesWEB (http://www.homesweb.com/) and RealEstateBig (http://www.realestatebig.com/), and the U.K.offers SeLoger (http://www.seloger.co.uk). Examples of such portals in India includeMagicBricks (http://www.magicbricks.com/), Makaan (http://www.makaan.com/), andPropertymart (http://www.propertymart.co.in/).

Sports PortalsSeveral portals cater to the needs of sports lovers. A typical example of a sports portal is ESPN STARSports (http://www.espnstar.com), which covers tennis, hockey, international cricket, and motorsports.Other popular sports portals, to name a few, are Sky Sports (http://www.skysports.com/),Sportal (http://sportal.nic.in/), and Sify Sports (http://sify.com/sports/). The last two specificallycater to sports in India. All these portals cover various aspects of different sports, such as livescores, live matches, replays, game analysis, and so on.Now that you’ve seen the classifications of web portals depending on their use and application,consider some of the advantages offered by portals over conventional web sites.

Portal Advantages

I’ve mostly discussed portals in terms of content aggregation and page-layout customization.But I also hinted at extended functionality that portals can offer: collaboration amonguser communities. In fact, a portal designer can create different user communities on a singleportal and ask users to register for each of them. The designer can present different content, adifferent look and feel, and different collaboration features that depend on the community towhich the user belongs. You might find these kinds of collaboration features in a portal:

• Group discussions: You can host group discussions on your portal, whereby the userscan discuss a topic in a message board that you establish. This kind of collaborationoffers several advantages over conventional group e‑mail discussions. Users can join orleave the discussion at any time without affecting others who have currently logged in,and they can archive discussion threads for later viewing.

• Blogs: A portal can allow the user to publish opinions in a blog, just as users cando on Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) or Windows Live Spaces (http://home.spaces.live.com/). The blogs can be made public for others to view, so general userscan read the views of senior-level users who offer insight into industry and markettrends, for example.

• Document sharing: A portal can allow sharing of existing documents and other mediasuch as photographs. This feature would require proper document management.

• Wikis: Your portal can host wikis, which enable users to create web pages, edit them,and link them together. Wikis function like a shared notebook whereby users can sharetheir ideas collaboratively.

• Shared calendars: A portal can also host shared calendars, which can prove useful inmanaging both company-hosted and user-hosted events. This feature lets users schedulemeetings and send invitations.

As you can see, a portal can provide several features to facilitate collaboration among itsusers, thus providing a richer user experience than conventional web sites can offer.

Creating a Portal with Liferay

Now that you’ve seen what a web portal is and what benefits it offers over conventional websites, I’ll show you how to create one. A portal, as I mentioned earlier, consists of a wide varietyof applications that might or might not relate to one another: blogs, document managementapps, wikis, calendars, and so on. Obviously, no single vendor can provide all the necessarytools to integrate those features into your web portals. You will thus need to incorporate toolsfrom different vendors. These tools might use diverse technologies, which could pose an integrationchallenge because the portal’s applications need to work together.Many vendors provide tools for creating portals and servers to host the portals. Some ofthe popular tools and servers are Oracle WebLogic Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal Server, SunJava System Portal Server (also known as GlassFish Web Space Server), and Microsoft OfficeSharePoint Server. Among open source technologies, Liferay is a popular portal server.Liferay Portal essentially provides a framework for creating any of the types of portalsthat I’ve discussed. Think of it like a web application that’s hosted on a web server of yourchoice. It supports many servers in the market because it complies strictly with standards.Liferay provides a complete development environment you can use to create a portal. Itprovides a runtime environment for hosting Java-based portal applications, also known asportlets. It offers a container where you assemble the portlets, configure them, and set theirlook and feel.A typical portal page running in a Liferay portal is shown in Figure 1-13.The Liferay web site shown in Figure 1-13 is itself based on the Liferay Portal product.As you can see, it resembles other web portals you’ve seen. Perhaps the next web portal youencounter will be running on Liferay.