Portal development overview

Use Rational Developer to create, customize, test, debug, and deploy your portal. This section also contains information about Portal Designer accessibility and limitations.

A portal is a J2EE Web application. It provides an interactive framework where developers can associate many portlet applications via one or more pages. The term portal is also used to refer to the look and feel of the entire application.

Portal development support is currently provided for WebSphere Portal Server v5.0 only.

 

Portal projects

A portal project is the file collection that you create for both the structural and aesthetic framework of your portal. The basic elements of the project include:

• Project name

• Server type definition

• Default theme

• Default skin

For information on getting started with portal projects, refer to Creating portal projects.

 

Customizing a portal site

The Portal Designer is the component of Rational Developer that allows you to customize the appearance, navigation, and content of your portal. To learn more about Portal Designer, refer to Using Portal Designer.

There are several aspects that contribute to the visual design of your portal:

• Navigation and Layout- organize the hierarchy of your portal by adding labels and pages. Edit the layout of your portlets within your portal pages. For more information, refer to Defining layouts.

• Themes and Skins - the graphic design of your portal is defined by the themes and skins you apply to it. To customize the graphic appearance of your portal, refer to Working with themes and Working with skins.

• Styles - styles apply to the visual use of text, tables and images within your portal. CSS Designer gives you the ability to edit and create style sheets that produce a consistent format throughout your portal themes and skins. For more information, refer to Editing styles.

The content within your portal depends on the portlets and portlet applications that you insert into each page. Within a portal page, portlets are separated from each other by skins (see Working with skins). For more information, refer to Adding portlets to portal pages

 

Testing a portal

You can test, debug or profile a portal project using the workbench. All three of these tasks involve running a portal on a server, either on the test environment within the workbench (local), or on separate server (remote, or server attach).

 

Deploying a portal

This process covers the details of moving your portal project from your hard drive to a server. Deploy means that the software will guide the process of installing your project to a server. Export means that the software will guide you through the process of packaging your project in a form that will allow you to manually install to a server.

 

Portal application samples

The Samples Gallery provides sample portal applications to illustrate portal development. You can examine these sample portal application projects in your own development environment.

Creating a portal application sample project is far simpler than creating one from scratch, because a wizard imports all necessary resources, including content, and the project is ready to run from your workspace.

For more information about the available portal samples,

• Select Help > Samples Gallery. Then, expand Application samples and Portal to create the following sample:
  • Auction Portal

• Select Help > Samples Gallery. Then, expand Technology samples and Portal to create the following sample:
  • Portal Project

 

Limitations and accessibility

When working with the portal in Portal Designer, there are a few limitations:

• Access Control - Portal Designer does not support access control. For instance, if you create a page and want to specify it as your "private" page, you will have first deploy the portal application to the server, then use the admin portlet to set the access rights to the page.

• Accessibility - When using Portal Designer, screen readers such as JAWS will not be able to read the correct label or page name from within the portal configuration editor. The best practice is to access page and label features from within the Outline view, which resides to the lower left of the portal configuration editor.

 

Related concepts

Portlet tools overview

 

Related tasks

Creating portal projects
Customizing portal sites
Adding portlets to portal pages
Testing, debugging, or profiling portals
Publishing portals