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Tuesday May 18th
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Portals, Portlets, and the design of Java Middleware
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| Thanks to Howard Gilbert for his excellent presentation that covered a variety of technologies of interest to those developing and deploying portal applications. Howard started his presentation by defining portals/portlets and dispelling common misconceptions. He then went into the nuts and bolts of Apache's Pluto which is a reference implementation of JSR 168. Following Pluto, uPortal (open-source) was discussed which pre-dates JSR-168 and was developed by a consortium of universities prior to JSR-168. As of version 2.2 uPortal is compliant with JSR-168. uPortal has been around for several years and is successfully being used today in large production environments. The discussion then proceeded to CAS (Central Authentication Service) which is a robust single sign-on service that has been developed by Yale and is open source. Yale presently has deployed CAS to provide single sign-on for their portal. Finally, the presentation closed out with a discussion on Shibboleth which is an open source project designed to "to support inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls." |
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Schedule
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5:30-6:00
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Food & Network
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5:30-7:30
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Presentation |
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7:30-7:45
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Q&A |
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Abstract
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Java open source portal projects (Apache Jetspeed, JA-SIG uPortal) and standards (Portlets) provide a platform to aggregate data sources and allow a user to subscribe to information sources of interest. Unlike a web page, the portal has no content of its own, but embeds content from external sources within a unified presentation
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Yale has been involved with the uPortal project since its beginning. This talk will describe the general design of portals, the Portlet standard and alternatives, and solutions to the problems that immediately arise like single signon, authentication across institutions, resolving institutional demands with user preferences.
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| Although Yale is familiar with particular solutions (uPortal, CAS, Shibboleth), and all these solutions are freely available, this will not be a “sales pitch” for a particular answer. It is important to honestly list the options we did not adopt and the advantages they would have provided. The purpose of this talk, then, is to drill down into some general middleware issues and make this entire subject understandable. However, since there is real code actually deployed at many institutions, this discussion involves practical options and not just theory. |
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Speaker
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PCLT is a private project of Howard Gilbert. By day, a Senior Research Programmer at Computing and Information Systems, Yale University. At night and on weekends, doomed to wander the Information Highway in search of Netvana. All opinions are those of the author, who not only does not speak for Yale University, but after 20 years of employment has yet to find anyone else who does.
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Door Prizes
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