Portals provide personalized access to information, applications, processes,
and people. Typically, portals get information from local or remote data
sources such as databases, transaction systems, syndicated content providers,
and remote Web sites. They render and aggregate this information into
composite pages to provide information in a compact and easily consumable
form. Many portals include applications like e-mail, calendars, organizers,
banking, and bill presentment, just to name a few.
Different rendering and selection mechanisms are required for different
information and applications, but they all rely on the portal's
infrastructure and operate on data or resources owned by the portal, like
user profile information, persistent storage, or access to managed content.
Consequently, most of today's portal implementations provide a component
model that allows p... (more)
Portlets are visual components that make up a Web page residing in a Web
portal. Typically, when an end user requests a personalized Web page,
multiple portlets are invoked when that page is created. An example is a
news/financial portal that displays a single page that includes updated
financial news, a report on how the stock market is doing, and the latest
information on stocks of interest to the end user. Each component consists of
one or more portlets.
Portlets rely on APIs to communicate with the portal and access various types
of information, such as a user profile. The l... (more)
With the emergence of an increasing number of enterprise portals, different
vendors have created a variety of APIs for portal components, or portlets.
Similarly, various vendors are introducing different mechanisms for
invocation of remote visual components. The resulting incompatible interfaces
create problems for application providers, portal customers, and portal
server vendors.
The Java Portlet API and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) standards
will overcome these problems by providing interoperability between portlets
and portals as well as between portals and visual,... (more)
After graduating in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe, Stefan worked for three years in the Research Center Karlsruhe in the area of medical robotics and component-based software architectures for real-time systems. In 1998 he joined the IBM where he worked with Java Cards in the areas of security and card management. After joining the IBM Pervasive Computing division, he worked on the SyncML reference implementation and is now engaged in the IBM WebSphere Portal Server project and co-leads the JSR 168 to standardize the Portlet API. 
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
