Chapter 1, Portal Assessment, covers the initial assessment of a portal project to a proof of value or concept exercise. It looks at the cloud as a possible paradigm for portal applications. It ends up with a case study that leverages the IBM Toolbox and Portal Accelerator Banking template to illustrate it in a step-by-step way.

Chapter 2, Portal Governance: Adopting the Mantra of Business Performance through IT Execution, covers the importance of portal governance and the best practices aligned with management and processes, to support at the enterprise level. It looks at steps to formulate and implement a portal governance committee and its associated roles.

Chapter 3, Portal Requirements Engineering, covers requirements engineering in the context of application lifecycle management. It provides step-by-step guidelines for functional and nonfunctional lifecycles, from requirements gathering to validation.

Chapter 4, Portal Architecture: Analysis and Design, covers another iterative step in a development lifecycle. It is time to take the requirements and exercise architectural analysis and design for both the functional and nonfunctional aspects, as they are mapped to portal capabilities.

Chapter 5, Portal Golden and Cloud Architecture, covers the best practices in building portal environments for high availability, and delivering the operationalization of the business models. In the context of traditional and cloud-hosted environments. It also looks at the best practices of modeling for portal capacity planning and sizing.

Chapter 6, Portal Build, Deployment, and Release Management, covers the interdisciplinary aspect of build, deploy, and release management in the context of traditional and cloud environments. It covers best practices for build and release management, portal tools and provides a high-level step-by-step release process for WEF and WP.

Chapter 7, Introduction to Web Experience Factory, will introduce Web Experience Factory (WEF) along with its main concepts — model, builder, and profile. We also cover the concept of regeneration of WEF applications and the details of its development environment. We finish this chapter by demonstrating how to create a WEF project and how a portlet can be deployed to WebSphere Portal directly from the development environment.

Chapter 8, Service Layers, covers WEF features to support the service-oriented development pattern. We explain the Service Consumer/Provider development pattern, and at the same time, we discuss the list of builders available to implement such a pattern. We also develop two sample models to demonstrate the utilization of this approach.

Chapter 9, Invoking Web Service, shows you how to implement Service Provider models, which can access web services. We cover the powerful and versatile Web Service builder call in detail, and explain how you can build a Service Provider model, which retrieves data through a web service. We also cover the WEF mechanisms available to transform and manipulate response data. A sample model is developed to demonstrate the utilization of this builder.

Chapter 10, Building the Application User Interface, focuses on how WEF builds user interface models. We explain in detail how WEF builds the application user interface. We cover a multitude of UI development-related topics, such as the data-driven development approach, high-level and low-level builders, design pane, and the Rich Data Definition builder call. We also develop a sample model to demonstrate the utilization of the new and incredible Data Service User Interface builder call.

Chapter 11, The Dojo Builders and Ajax, takes you to a journey into the incredible world of Dojo and Ajax. We demonstrate how WEF uses these technologies to provide cutting-edge builders and techniques that will make your applications not only look like, but also behave like the latest Web 2.0 applications. We also explain the performance benefits associated with the utilization of Dojo Builder calls and Ajax techniques. Two sample models enable you to get hands-on experience with both Dojo and Ajax.

Chapter 12, WEF Profiling, covers one of the pillars of WEF technology — profiling. We explain what profiling is, how it works, and how you can take advantage of this powerful technology to provide variability to your application. In addition to covering a profile set and profile, we dissect the profile set editor and all of its elements and nuances. We finish this chapter by working on an extensive sample, which illustrates the richness of profiling, and the numerous manners in which it can enhance your application, addresses requirement challenges, and reduces development costs.

Chapter 13, Types of Models, identifies and discusses the different model types a developer can use in order to develop an efficient application. No other WEF book has ever presented this topic. We demonstrate why it is important to use different model types to develop an application. We then clearly define when and how each of the available model types can be efficiently used to develop reusable, well-organized, and well-structured applications.

Chapter 14, WEF and Mobile Web Applications, addresses the development of web applications not only for mobile devices, but also, above all, for multichannel applications. It analyzes the differences between the development of traditional and mobile web applications. This chapter presents the builders and the framework provided by WEF to develop multichannel applications. We also develop a sample application, which can be invoked from multiple devices, including mobile devices.

Chapter 15, How to Implement a Successful Portal Project with WEF, completes the WEF coverage in this book. We put together a rich set of observations and recommendations that should be followed by any portal project. These recommendations are the result of many years of experience working with WEF. We cover topics that range from the required skills to successfully implement a portal project with WEF, to the type of training and mentoring required, to the proper handling of source control all the way to the development of POCs and prototypes with WEF.

Chapter 16, Portlet and Portal Testing, covers some of the best practices in portal and portlet testing. The test-driven approach is discussed along with some of the techniques used for validating the compliance to a portal's functional and nonfunctional goals via testing.

Chapter 17, Portal and Portlet Performance Monitoring, covers the subject of monitoring, which allows one to measure the success of the portal based on the established criteria. Both business and technical monitoring are much needed capabilities to ensure the right visibility, which allows for the tracking of goals and KPIs. It also covers the tools and metrics to be used during this process.

Chapter 18, Portal Troubleshooting, covers the main approaches for classifying, isolating, and resolving portal problems via troubleshooting and problem determination. It also covers tooling and the best practices applied to troubleshooting.

Chapter 19, Portal, WEF, and Portlet Tuning, covers mature processes for tuning lifecycles and test cases. It covers aspects related to the response time, throughput, and bottleneck resolution. It gives real samples of common bottlenecks and how to tune them.

Chapter 20, Portal Post-production, covers post-production of the main areas of APM, training, impersonation, and the potential benefits of a cloud-based solution. It provides an insight into the continuing support and processes around portal maintenance after the first production deployment.

This book is comprised of two complementing segments. One segment covers the numerous aspects of implementing an IBM WebSphere Portal project and all its nuances. The other segment addresses the development of portlets using Web Experience Factory.

For the segment related to portal projects, no prior knowledge or experience with the portal is required. Of course, you will benefit even more from reading this segment if you have been exposed to the portal technology.

Equally, for the WEF segment, no prior experience is required. However, if you have not been exposed to WEF development before, we recommend you read and complete a couple of introductory WEF tutorials to maximize your understanding of the material and the exercises we develop. The standard installation of WEF offers a couple of useful tutorials that can provide you with the initial foundation on WEF.

While portal knowledge is not required, some basic knowledge of IBM WebSphere Portal is desirable. This basic knowledge can then be leveraged and advanced towards understanding how WEF powerfully and cooperatively works with IBM WebSphere Portal.

For the WEF chapters, access to a running installation of IBM WebSphere Portal Version 7 is required. An instance of WEF should also be installed on the same machine along with WebSphere Portal. WEF 7.0.0 will suffice for all chapters except for Chapter 14, WEF and Mobile Web Applications. For this chapter, you need at least version 7.0.1.

This book is for portal architects, specialists, developers, WEF architects, testers, project managers, and business owners as well. Because it covers business and technical aspects, it can be applicable to any portal business or technical stakeholder.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " Move the .war files to portal and deploy portlets."

A block of code is set as follows:

<html>
<body>
<form name="RTE_Form" method="post">
<div name="PageTitle"
style="font:12pt Arial; font-weight:
bold;color: #336699;">
</div><br>
<table>
<tr>
<td >
<div name="refreshMessageArea">
<span name="inputText_RTE"></span><br>
<div name="DjContainer">
<span name="messageEntry_TXT"></span>
</div>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div style="padding:20px;">
<span name="append_BTN" ></span>
<span name="replace_BTN" ></span>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

../bin/releasebuilder.sh inNew todays_release_dir/exported_ExportRelease.xml
-inOld previous_release_dir/exported_ExportRelease.xml -out
todays_release_dir/Release.xml

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "These include Broker Services view where the Customer Vault, Account Info, Transfer Info, Vault Feature, Deposit, and Vault Loan processes can be managed and operated on, as shown in the following screenshot."

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