Portals

In its most general definition, a portal provides a point of entry to a data collection that has been collected and organised according to audience needs. The term is used widely and in different ways, and a service describing itself as a portal may provide entry to extensive collections of databases or simply offer a list of links to other relevant sites. Other terms that have been used to describe this type of service include: gateway, subject gateway, digital library, clearinghouse, and Internet resource guide.

For a detailed discussion of definitions and types of portals refer to Londsale, M. (2003) Global Gateways: a guide to online knowledge networks 3rd ed, education.au limited/ACER.
http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/global_gateways_v3.pdf

What distinguishes portals from static websites is their ability to incorporate data from multiple sources in multiple formats, yet organise it in a consistent way and provide integrated access within a browser.

Many portals also offer value-added services such as email, web page hosting or filtered information flow. Increasingly portal architecture standards also support personalised features, such as user profiling and single sign-on and point of entry to multiple collections of distributed resources or databases; and may offer different content for different users.

Portlet

Portlets or portal applets are “web components, managed by a portlet container (portal), that process requests and generate dynamic content” in response to a particular user. Usually multiple portlets are invoked to create a personalised web page.
(Source: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2003/jw-0801-portlet.html)

Portlets rely on APIs to access various types of information, such as user profile. Portal server vendors have tended to define proprietary APIs for local and remote portal components creating interoperability problems for portal customers, application vendors, content providers and portal software vendors.
(Source: http://www.nwfusion.com/details/666.html)

The goal of portal standards is to rationalise the way portlets interact with the portal software itself. Standardising this interface allows portlets created in different development environments to operate predictably with any standards-supporting portal. This simplifies the process of designing and coding what the portal needs to see from the portlet and vice versa, and thus assists content providers.

7 items in this category.

1. Common Look and Feel for the Internet
   Category: Portals
   
   The Common Look and Feel Web site has been developed to assist Canadian federal government departments and agencies with the implementation of the Treasury Board Common Look and Feel (CLF) Standards.
   
   

2. JSR 168: Portlet Specification
   Category: Portals
   
   To enable interoperability between Portlets and Portals, this specification will define a set of APIs for Portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security.
   
   

3. JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0
   Category: Portals
   
   Version 2.0 of the Portlet Specification plans to align with J2EE 1.4, integrate other new JSRs relevant for the portlet, and align with the WSRP specification V 2.0. The new Portlet Specifications will add functionality that was not addressed in the first version specification.
   
   

4. List of User-Agents (Spiders, Robots, Browser)
   Category: Portals
   
   This searchable database of user-agents as used by browsers, search-engines spiders and crawlers, web-directories, download managers, link checkers, proxy servers, web filtering tools, harvesters, spambots, badbots enables more meaningful reporting of web statistics. Sorted by the user-agents names with informations about their type, purpose and origin. The info-field at every user-agents entry offers even more information. Recent additions and updates are at the top of each page. XML version available.
   
   

5. OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) TC
   Category: Portals
   
   WSRP defines a set of interfaces and related semantics which standardize interactions with components providing user-facing markup, including the processing of user interactions with that markup. This allows applications to consume such components as providing a portion of the overall user application without having to write unique code for interacting with each component.
   
   

6. UPortal
   Category: Portals
   
   A free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. It is a collaborative development project with the effort shared among several of the JA-SIG member institutions. You may download uPortal and use it on your site at no cost.
   
   

7. Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)
   Category: Portals
   
   

   This document contains information relevant to 'Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)' and is part of the Cover Pages resource. The Cover Pages is a comprehensive Web-accessible reference collection supporting the SGML/XML family of (meta) markup language standards and their application. The principal objective in this public access knowledgebase is to promote and enable the use of open, interoperable standards-based solutions which protect digital information and enhance the integrity of communication.