Portals and Portlet Containers How Portals play an important role in e-Research applications. Mathew Wyatt

2 What is a Portal? A grand and imposing entrance. A Website that acts as a "doorway" to the Internet or a portion of the Internet, targeted towards a particular domain.  Web Portal – Personalised web front end  Google, Yahoo  Enterprise Portal – Portal Applications for business Intranet  Research Portal – DART & ARCHER  Using Portlets – Markup fragments, independent of each other  Limited functionality comp. to servlets  Gridsphere - CIMA, PGL, Grid Submission Portlets Portlet Standards: JSR 168 Portlets – Supported by near all containers

3 Portals for Research Currently highly customised and specific to a discipline – web application  Entrez-PubMed  No user control, bounded within contraints of the site How can the Web Portal concept be applied to research? Core element of e-Research infrastructure  intergrating many seperate e-research components in a common look and feel  researcher customised environment  developing generic portlets  remote access to services

4 JSR 168 Portlet Strenghts and Weaknesses Strenghts Web based Familiar interfaces Ubiquitis Access Becooming more flexible – embedding of media Customization fo interface – non programmer level Portal/Portlet deployment is easy Hides the pain of the grid (more a promise than a deliverable) - Gridsphere Weaknesses Authenticalion security? Container issues – standard compliance across the board Interportlet communication in JSR168 Development and testing is diabolicly slow – especially in Gridsphere!

JSR 168 Portlet Deployment Architecture Portlet Container Portal Page Portlets Database Portlet container within a web server Presentation layer code in Portlet, deployed in Portlet container Program logic in web service container, or in Portlet container Usually involves some external database or data source/stream Web Service Container Data Source/Stream

JSR 286 Portlet Deployment Architecture – With help from WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) Portlet Producer WSRP Container/s Portlet Consumer Deployed Producer Portlets Portlet Markup IN DEVELOPMENT! Portlets deployed to a WSRP container – Producer Portlets Producer Portlets hold program logic, as well as GUI definitions/descriptions /markup Consumer container consumes Portlet markup from Producer

7 JSR168 & JSR286 Suggested ModificationJSR168JSR286 Corrections and Clarifications N/A Clarifying original specificatuion Add access to CC/PP data via JSR188 API No native support. Allows Composite Capability/Preference Profiles to be extracted from the request. This allows for appropriate/custom responses from the portlet to be generated dependant on the requesting device. E.g. content returned to a broadband user on a PC should be different to the content returned to a WAP user on a mobile phone (reduce richness of content to cater for reduced connection speed and reduce display resolution). Inter-portlet communication as defined in WSRP 2.0 Interportlet communication is achieved by passing data via the session. Limited to portlets within a portlet application. Session only updated when a submission by user occurs. Only the target portlet can update the session state. This means modifications to other portlets not submitted are discarded. All portlets in application are asked to re-render, but no order is specified. Similar method of portlet communication. Portlets reside in the same container, and can be given group ID’s for sharing privileges.

JSR 168 & JSR 286 Public render parameters as defined in WSRP 2.0 No native support. State information passed to the portlet in addition to the normal request parameters. Allows WS’s to pass contextual rendering information that might be used by the portal. Enhance caching support and align caching with WSRP Data caching is responsibility of developer. Portal to cache infrequently updated content from WSRP services. This allows WSRP service provider to service many users with little IT infrastructure. No indication of how. Enhance the portlet tag library Basic Portlet Tag Library exists. Individual container vendors provide custom extensions specific to that container. Reduction in dependence on third party tag libraries for portlet interface markup. Align with WSRP versions 2.0 Currently can use WSRP 1 WSRP 2.0 will be binary compatible withy WSRP 1. Registry for services discovery perhaps? Coordinate with the JSF EG to better align JSF with portlets Some success being made to make JSF portlets that will run in jSR168 compliant containers. JSF – component focused web application framework. Better implementation of the MVC model. JSF has an event model for use in each portlet.

9 Portlet Containers IMB Websphere  Leaders in portal server – Trend Setters  Major impact on standards Development  Expensive!!! Jboss Portal  Enterprise level for free  RedHat merger JetSpeed  Apache Portal server Gridsphere  The one we use.

10 Gridsphere Defacto Portlet container for the Australian e-Research community  APAC Standard Portlet API implementation fully 100% JSR 168 compliant Portlet development supported using Java Server Faces (JSF) standard Additional Portlet API implementation nearly fully compatible with IBM's WebSphere® 4.2 Persistence of data provided using Hibernate JDO/OQL for database support Open-source and 100% free! :-) How does gridsphere differ from any other Portlet container? And why do we use it? Answer: Grid Friendly i.e. Grid Portlets for OGSA

11 Portals for DART Possibility: e-Research gateway, fully customisable environment for research community. PGL  Standard portlets for SRB viewing/manipulation CIMA  Standard portlets for data/video streaming  Future:  Generate interface based on Instrument Ontology Kepler  Possibility of web based control of Kepler workflows (Tristan King)