Andrey Yasinetskiy@Software Development

Introduction

Over the some time I engaged in search of good stable platform for my new web-project, designed for big auditorium, high loads and large volume of data. The main criteria are: stability for high loads, implemented basic functionality (authorization, user accounts, simple news, comments, rss feeds and others…) to reduce time on development, component architecture, supported clusterization, work with separated databases, and easy scalability.
The recent pleasant discovery for me was the Portal Java technology, which implements specification JSR-168 (Java Specification Request).

What is JSR-168?

Portlets are Web-based components managed by portlet containers that supply
dynamic content. Portals employ portlets as pluggable user-interface components—a
presentation layer—for information systems.
Originally proposed by Sun and IBM and released in October 2003, JSR 168 defines the APIs that standardize the development of portlets. It performs two major tasks:

• Defines a standard Java technology-based Web component model for portlets in portal servers that are built on the Java platform.
• Enables portability and vendor independence.

However, JSR 168 does not define interoperability of remote portlets. Portlets that are built according to the JSR 168 model work with all Java technology-based portal servers.

• Simple API
• Component architecture
• Great scalability
• Hot deployment and re-deployment of Portal applications
• Support for Localization and Internationalization
• Ready to use a lot of functionality by hundreds Portlets

Portal platforms

There’re some famous opensource Portal implementations:

• Liferay Portal (http://www.liferay.com)
• JBoss Portal (http://www.jboss.org/products/platforms/portals)
• Sun Java System Portal Server (http://www.sun.com/software/products/portal_srvr/index.xml)
• Jakarta Jetspeed 2 (http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/)
• Pluto (http://portals.apache.org/pluto/)