Book Image

IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

Book Image

IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

Overview of this book

IBM WebSphere® Portal is a cost- effective, scalable, and proven solution for the portal enterprise space. Given the depth and the breadth of WebSphere Portal and the challenges of developing a portal project, you need a book that covers all the nuances of the entire portal project lifecycle. This book accomplishes just that. In this book, we cover topics that range from portal assessment, governance, and architecture, to design and development. These topics are covered not only within these traditional areas, but also within the cloud environment context. Keeping both contexts in mind, several chapters are dedicated to portal and portlet testing, troubleshooting, performance monitoring, best practices, and tuning. The cloud option is also analyzed and discussed for hosting, developing, and publishing portal applications. We also cover Web Experience Factory (WEF) as the tool of choice for portlet development. We take you from the introduction to the development of advanced portlets in an intuitive and efficient manner. We cover not only common topics, such as builders, models, and user interface development, but also advanced topics, such as Dojo builders, Ajax techniques, and WEF performance. Within the WEF space, we cover other topics, which have never been covered before by any other competing book. You will learn how to develop multichannel applications, including web mobile applications and you will learn about the model types available for portlet development, including when and how to utilize them. We also present and discuss numerous aspects and facets of implementing a WEF project and what it takes to successfully deliver them. The richness and the profundity of the topics combined with an intuitive and well-structured presentation of the chapters will provide you with all the information you need to master your skills with the IBM WebSphere Portal project lifecycle and Web Experience Factory.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
IBM WebSphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

IBM WebSphere Portal (WP), IBM Web Experience Factory (WEF), and the cloud


Portals are single point of access for information, knowledge, business services, and transactions; providing aggregation and role-based access to Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Employee (B2E); along with vertical and horizontal domain support. Portals also allow for that data to be served on a variety of devices, anytime, anywhere. From an architectural viewpoint, a portal is an architectural pattern implemented and realized via a product with out-of-the-box integration potentials and capabilities. From a technology standpoint, the IBM WebSphere Portal is a J2EE application with its engine being compliant with portal-specific APIs, such as JSR 168, JSR 286, and WSRP. So what is the cloud and how can it help you with your WP and WEF related initiatives? Let's first start with some basic definitions.

Cloud is a delivery model that uses virtualization to build, provision, deploy, and enable environments, resources, and services. More precisely, its canonical definition according to the working definition of cloud computing published by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is as follows:

Cloud computing can be described as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned, and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

To complement it, IBM defines cloud computing as follows:

Cloud computing changes the way we think about technology. Cloud is a computing model providing web-based software, middleware, and computing resources on demand. By deploying technology as a service, you give users access only to the resources they need for a particular task. This prevents you from paying for idle computing resources. Cloud computing can also go beyond cost savings by allowing your users to access the latest software and infrastructure offerings to foster business innovation.