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

The development environment


Before we discuss key components of WEF, let's take a look at the development environment.

From a development environment perspective, WEF is a plugin that is installed into either Eclipse or IBM Rational Application Developer for Websphere. As a plugin, it uses all the standard features from these development environments at the same time that it provides its own perspective and views to enable the development of portlets with WEF.

Let's explore the WEF development perspective in Eclipse. The WEF development environment is commonly referred to as the designer. While we explore this perspective, you will read about new WEF-specific terms. In this section, we will neither define nor discuss them, but don't worry. Later on in this chapter, you will learn all about these new WEF terms.

The following screenshot shows the WEF perspective with its various views and panes:

The top-left pane, identified by number 1, shows the Project Explorer tab. In this pane you...