Portal WorkGroup

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Portal WorkGroup

• D Giaretta

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Task

• concentrate on developing the portal, providing
  a simple front end and developing a means for
  adding independent modules to the portal
  (portlets)
• the technology will be based on Cocoon.
• A sample portlet will be developed which will
  allow a simple interactive query of the Registry
  web service.

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Portals and Portlets

• Portals provide a secure, single point of
  interaction with diverse information, business
  processes, and people, personalized to a user's
  needs and responsibilities. (IBM working
  definition)
• Portlets visibly active component displaying
  data within a Portal page

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Technologies

• Jakarta (various)
• JetSpeed to create enterprise information portal
• Velocity template engine allows information
  import from Java classes for dynamic content
• Cocoon provides a framework for generating pages
  from XML merged with XSL templates
• Turbine database connection pooling, user and
  session management facilities and security
  management
• Torque persistence layer
• Sun Engine Portal portlet now Open Source
• WebSphere
• ..

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Portal Planning - questions

• How many users?
• Is there already an existing authentication
  database for these users, do I want to use it?
• How many languages?
• How many media types do I want to support?
• How many and which segments/target groups do I
  have to serve
• What content do I want to publish?
• How can I get access to this content (disk, db,
  syndication, etc...)?
• Who is going to update the site content and with
  what editorial process?
• What applications do I need to connect to?
• Are they already using a single authentication
  db?
• How do I bridge to these apps (servlet, http,
  SOAP, CORBA, etc...)?
• For each user target group, what
  application/content do they need to access?
• Can they personalize their portal view?
• What access rights should they have?
• What will be your portal navigation?
• Do you plan to set up different thematic portal
  views or a single integrated workspace?

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Then - decisions

• What kind of software tools and features you'll
  need.
• What kind of skills you'll require.
• An estimate of the amount of work required to
  setup your portal.
• What budget you'll need to complete your portal
  transition.
• Where to start

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Architecture
Client Browser
JetSpeed
WebService
WebService
WebService
WebService
Velocity
Cocoon
Torque
Turbine
TomCat
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Portlet API

• JSP 168
• Supported by JetSpeed
• See reference

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Timescales and Resources

• Velocity Portlet demo
• Velocity/JSP Portlet connecting to Web Service
• Simple request
• 2 way interaction
• Map authentication/authorisation to CAS
• Portlet to existing VO Web service
• Portlet to WSDL to generated interface form
• Portlet to Registry Web Service

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Questions for Overall Architecture

• How should authentication/ authorisation map to
  CAS/GRID
• Load expected
• Number of users expected
• Types of Web Services

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Project set-up

• Guinea pigs?
• CVS
• Coding standards
• ANT set-up

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Jetspeed

• David Giaretta

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Jetspeed

• Open Source Apache project
• Written in Java
• Supports Portal API (JSP 168)
• Provides built-in services for
• User interface customisation
• Caching
• Persistence
• User authentication
• Makes connections to obtain data

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Jetspeed Architecture
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Jetspeed

• Built on top of Turbine (also Jakarta project)
• Turbine provides
• User authentication
• Page layout

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Jetspeed features

• Built-in support for
• RDF Site Summary (RSS)
• Open Content Syndication (OCS)
• Supports Wireless Markup language
• User, group, role and permission administration
  via secure portlets
• Role-based security access to portlets

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• PortletControl The function of the
  PortletControl within the Portlet page handles
  rendering the title and body of the Portlet
• PortletController The function of the
  PortletController is to handle multiple
  PortletControls (each controlling a Portlet) to
  provide an entire Page of information from all
  the Portlets.

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Markup/Configuration

• Portal Structure Markup Language
• holds info on what portlets are available and
  registered with Jetspeed
• Registry
• Describes all available portlets
• Site
• Describes what portlets can be displayed to a
  given user and
• Describes how information is displayed for that
  user

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Standard Portlets

• HTML
• Displays HTML content
• JSP
• JSP contains embedded Java
• RSS
• Web Page
• Displays content of a Web site
• XSL
• Displays XML content by transforming it into HTML
  using XSLT
• Velocity

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Web Services tools

• org.apache.jetspeed.webservices.util.SoapAccessBea
  n
• SoapAccessBean provides a Soap WebServices Client
  command bean pattern. This bean can be used to
  interact with webservices via soap. The WSDL file
  for the target web service is required since it
  contains the parameters required to interact with
  the service.
• org.apache.jetspeed.webservices.util.UDDIAccessBea
  n
• UDDIAccessBean provides a command bean interface
  to UDDI registry services. Please note that
  currently only inquiry tasks are supported.

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CVS

• Concurrent Versions System

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CVS is

• Based on a Copy-Modify-Merge model where the
  developer
• Downloads copy of code
• Modify code
• NB simultaneously any other user can download,
  update and then merge into Master repository
• Merges with repository but user has to resolve
  with any other incompatible changes
• NOT Lock-Modify-Unlock

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Details

• Checkout
• From a Repository
• may be remote
• Security mechanisms e.g. anyone can read, but
  password needed for write
• Update
• Commit

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Mechanism - server

• Repository maintains differences between
  revisions
• Maintains additional metadata to identify each
  version
• Also able to tag a whole group of revisions e.g.
  Release Spring 2003
• Allows one to copy any whole set at any point in
  the future

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User

• Checks out copy
• Additional metadata is kept in extra CVS
  subdirectories

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Documentation

• CVS home page (http//www.cvshome.org/) and CVS
  manual (http//www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/index.h
  tml)
• CVS FAQ-o-matic (http//www.loria.fr/molli/fom-se
  rve/cache/1.html) recipes for simple and more
  arcane uses
• Introductions
• Introduction to CVS (http//www.cvshome.org/docs/
  blandy.html) by Jim Blandy
• Open Source Development with CVS by Karl Fogel
  (good, free chapters from a book of the same
  name).
• Best practice
• ACME, (http//www.enteract.com/bradapp/acme/)
  source code management best practices
  (encyclopaedic, but bewildering)
• Specifically branching Streamed Lines Branching
  Patterns for Parallel Software Development
  (http//www.enteract.com/bradapp/acme/branching/)
  
• CVS Best Practices (http//www.magic-cauldron.com/
  cm/cvs-bestpractices/index.html) is somewhat more
  compact than the ACME guide, and correspondingly
  more opinionated