Set up the development environment
Know the capabilities of two development environments for developing portlet applications for WebSphere Portal, IBM Rational Application Developer and Portlet Factory.
Rational Application Developer includes tools designed to help you develop portlet applications for WebSphere Portal. The portlet tools provide the following capabilities:
- Portlet project support for the standard portlet API and the IBM portlet API.
- Web perspective views and editors for developing portlets.
- Portlet project wizard to create basic portlets, Faces portlets, and Struts portlets.
- Edit and validation of the portlet deployment descriptor (portlet.xml).
- Testing and debugging of portlets within the workbench using the WebSphere Portal Test Environment.
- Testing and debugging of portlets on a remote machine using the WebSphere Portal Server Attach.
- Visual tooling to insert portlet programming objects into JSP files, using Page Designer.
- Portlet sample applications, available in the Samples Gallery.
- Educational tutorials, available in the Tutorials Gallery.
Before using Rational Application Developer, determine which configuration best suits your requirements. See the Rational Application Developer documentation for complete installation and configuration instructions on installing WebSphere Portal for use with Rational Application Developer. Portlet Factory: Its features include:
- Tight Integration with WebSphere Portal (auto deploy portlets, Click-2-Action, People Awareness, SSO).
- Plug-in to Eclipse and IBM Rational Application Developer.
- Multi-page, complex portlets without coding.
- SOA delivery/robust integration capabilities with existing applications.
- Unlimited customization without the maintenance overhead.
- Business user configuration.
- Rapid iteration and change.
- Flexible deployment options.
Related information
Parent topic:
Understand the basics