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Teaming Up Portals and Web Services
Portal technology uses Web services to integrate disparate applications and systems, giving enterprises interoperability without reinventing the wheel
by Ash Parikh, Rajesh Pradhan, and Nirav Shah

Posted April 21, 2004

Portal technology enables seamless interaction with Web applications through a unified and cohesive interface that serves as a one-stop shop for all of your application functionality needs. Portals also offer a personalized and customizable experience by enabling access based on preferences, privileges, and the luxury of making changes to the look and feel of the interface, when possible. They are the focal points for users to access content, information, and applications from many different data sources.

Typically, portals aggregate content from high-performance data sources that support transactions, content, and remote Web access. They render and aggregate this information into complex pages to provide information to users in a compact and simple form. Many portals also enable interactions with common applications such as e-mail, calendar, organizer, banking, bill payment, and so on. Most of today's portal implementations involve a component-based and modular model that allows the quick and easy inclusion of components referred to as portlets—content containers that provide users the view of their customized content—into the portal infrastructure. Portlets typically run on portal servers that handle the processing of input data and then render the appropriate output.

Beyond the hype, Web services are becoming the predominant method for making information and applications available over the Internet. They enable the seamless integration of content and applications from an intranet and the Internet. Examples of context-based and personalized access include company stock quotes, subscription-based news feeds, and enterprise application availability tailored to departmental needs. With their lightweight and loosely coupled benefits, Web services hold the promise to reengineer the way portals operate, as is evidenced by the efforts portal-infrastructure vendors are putting into their offerings by adding standards support and tools designed to simplify creating and consuming Web services.

Portals are about aggregating heterogeneous applications within a single framework. More specifically, Web services are about publishing this application functionality to whoever needs it in a standardized way. As enterprises look for ways to leverage their existing applications without reinventing the wheel, portals and Web services are emerging as two technologies that can work hand in hand to accelerate enterprise application integration.

Let's Get Physical
Content providers make content available to users as portlets, which run on portal servers and serve content that can be embedded into portal pages. To support common services, many portal server implementations use similar concepts including portlets, portal server architectures, and integration with remote portlets.