Portlet Factory, Version 6.1.2

 

Introduction to widgets

You can rapidly deliver dynamic, customizable, and adaptive widgets.

With WebSphere Portlet Factory, you can quickly and easily create, re-purpose, or assimilate web applications into widgets. These widgets can be customized by users within a protected and controllable framework.

WebSphere Portlet Factory applications can be deployed to a local IBM® Lotus® Mashups toolbox for development and testing. When development is completed, the widgets can be published to a IBM InfoSphere MashupHub catalog.

Developing a widget with WebSphere Portlet Factory consists of the following steps.

  1. Create a project to contain the new widgets using the New Project wizard.

  2. Create models that implement the widget functionality. Select the type of model wizard that best matches the functionality of the widget you are developing. For more information, see About creating and opening models.

  3. Use the Widget Adapter builder to specify the name and category for the widget when it is published to the Lotus Mashups server. The Widget Adapter is required for creating a widget.

  4. You can create a customizer for your widget by using the Widget Customizer builder.

  5. To define widget events that provide inter-widget communication, use the Widget Event builder.

  6. Run the model to test it on the local IBM WebSphere Application Server. This action also prompts you to save the model before running it, if you have unsaved changes. For more information, see Running models.

  7. Publish the widgets to the local Lotus Mashups toolbox. Right-click the project name in the Model Navigator. Click Widgets > Publish Widgets to Lotus Mashups toolbox.

  8. Deploy the widgets to InfoSphere MashupHub. For more information about deploying widgets, refer to Deployment configurations for widgets.

  • Developing widgets with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory

    During the course of development, you use the WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer to create and run widgets locally. The following steps assume that you have a locally-installed IBM Lotus Mashups server. This is the recommended practice for rapid development of widgets. If you do not have a local mashup server, refer to Deployment for Production (see below) for information about how to generate a production WAR to deploy widgets to a remote mashup server using the IBM InfoSphere MashupHub.

  • Implementing Widget Customize mode

    IBM Lotus Mashups developers have the ability to set parameters for a widget by customizing the widget.

  • Implementing inter-widget communication

    Use inter-widget communication to have widgets interact and share information.

  • Using widget events

    You can create widgets that use widget events to communicate with one another.

  • Profiling a widget

    You can profile a widget with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory.

Parent topic: Working with WebSphere Portlet Factory

Library | Support |