Portlets in Action

Preface

I first came across the Java Portlet technology in 2006. I was working on a data warehousing project, and data from different sources was managed by a portal application. My first encounter with the technology wasn’t a pleasant one—I faced issues with inter-portlet communication, Ajax, file downloading, and so on. After a lot of struggles and analysis, I was able to get past the limitations inherent in Portlet 1.0 by building ad hoc solutions involving Java servlets to address the business requirements. The design of these solutions resulted in a highly complex system that was hard to maintain and understand. It left me feeling that the Java Portlet technology wasn’t ready for developing web portals in the real world.

But even though ...