Using Macromedia Flex in a Portal Environment

Background Information

What Is a Portal?

A portal is a web application that aggregates content from different sources in an integrated user interface. In addition, portals usually provide personalization features, and single sign-on through their own built-in security infrastructure, or by integrating with third party solutions such as Netegrity SiteMinder.

What Is a Portlet?

A portlet is a Java-based web component, managed by a portlet container. Portals use portlets as pluggable user interface components. The content of a portlet is typically rendered in HTML (or another markup language) and aggregated with the content of other portlets to form the portal page.

What Is a Portlet Container?

A portlet container provides the runtime environment for portlets. A portlet container is asked by the portal to execute requests on portlets. A portlet container is not responsible for aggregating the content produced by the portlets. Aggregation is the responsibility of the portal.

Portal Vendors

Portal vendors include:

• IBM
• BEA
• Oracle
• Sun
• Vignette
• SAP
• Plumtree

What Is JSR-168?

Historically, different vendors created their own proprietary APIs for developing portlets, and runtime environments for executing them. The existence of different and incompatible APIs became a problem for ISVs and portal customers. The goal of the Java Standardization Request 168 (JSR-168) was to establish a standard to develop and execute portlets. With JSR-168, developers can develop portlets that you can deploy in any JSR-168 compliant container.

Find more information on JSR-168 on the Java Community Process website: www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168.

JSR-168 Adoption

Most portal vendors have implemented, or are in the process of implementing, the JSR-168 specification. For backward compatibility, portal vendors still support their own “pre-JSR 168” API. This is the case, for example, for IBM: With WSAD Portal Toolkit and WebSphere Portal Server you can develop and execute both IBM API- and JSR 168-based portlets.

Find more information on the differences between JSR-168 and the IBM API in the following article from IBM’s Stefan Hepper, one of the JSR-168 specification leads: www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0312_hepper/hepper.html

You can apply the Flex/portal integration discussed in this document to any JSR-168 compliant portal server, to WebSphere Portal Server with the IBM API-based portlet, and to other pre-JSR 168 vendor’s APIs with a few code modifications.

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