Foundation1 / Development Guide / Web Client / Howto / Portal / This page

Portal Development

IFS Personal Portal is supposed to be an entry point to IFS Applications. It will allow the user to create a personalized view of IFS Applications. The goal is to create an easy to understand page with a mixture of information and functionality.

As an entry point, the Portal will offer the possibility to start other web pages and also the IFS Enterprise Explorer application. The portal implementation is a compound of two parts:

The portal engine is the new IFS Web Client framework implemented for handling of portlets rather than pages. This part handles the presentation of the portlets and gives the user an ability to configure the portal presentation at the runtime. The portal engine is not any new product but an integral part of the existing IFS Web Client framework also written in Java and utilizing existing IFS Web Client classes.
The portlets are small boxes on the portal, can be consider as separate application pages showing on the same web page. The IFS portlets are developed in Java, compiled into Java classes and installed on the web server. Once a portlet is available on the web server, the users can pick it up and place it on their portal.

Not only the portal can be configured; one single portlet on the portal can be configured as well, unless the developer disables this ability at the design time. If enabled, the developer must provide a dialog for customizing the portlet.

Development of portlets and ordinary web pages is quite similar. The portlet developer will use the same structures and mechanisms for working with data as in case of ordinary web pages. Much work will be done if the developer can reuse the business logic related code from existing web pages. But, as it was mentioned previously, the portal page should offer only a limited functionality, so the portlet should only be a source of information and not an interactive form.

Portal Development

How to develop Portlets: