The new JavaTM Specification Request (JSR #168) will be the industry's first portal API standard. Eighteen companies, including BroadVision, Plumtree and Vignette will collaborate with Sun on the specification that will 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.

The portlet API is intended to enable application, content and service providers to implement portlets to a common, standard JavaTM technology portlet API and package them in a standard manner so that they can be deployed on all compliant portal servers. The specification will be based on Java technology APIs.

"The need for industry standards is vital in the large and rapidly growing portal market" said Gene Phifer, vice president and research director for Gartner, Inc. "As the delivery mechanism for Web services, portals will be come ubiquitous and must have a comprehensive standard defining interoperability for information exchange. A Java specification defining that integration process will substantially benefit customers, partners and developers."

Currently, a variety of different APIs for portal components from different portal vendors exist, which creates difficulties for application providers, portal customers, and portal server vendors. Once established, the intent of the specification is to allow developers to reuse existing integration methods for faster addition of data, applications, and Web services from multiple back-end sources and enable enterprises to more easily use portal platforms for the secure, single point of entry in delivery of personalized content between multiple internal and external portal deployments.

The Portlet specification will define the different components for Portal Computing, their interaction, lifecycle and semantics. These components will comprise -but they will not be restricted to-: Portlets, Deployment descriptor, Portlet APIs. In addition, APIs for vendor extensions, APIs for security, user customization and layout management will be considered.

This first version of the Portlet specification will concentrate in the following design goals:

• Client agnostic
• Support for multiple types of clients (multi-device)
• Simple Portlet API
• Support for Localization and Internationalization
• Hot deployment and re-deployment of Portal applications
• Declarative security (same as to the mechanism found in Servlet and Enterprise JavaBeansTM specs)
• Architected to support remote execution of Portlets

Full details of the request are available online:

http://www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/168.jsp [...read more...]

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