Portal Tools overview

The IBM® Rational® Software Development Platform gives you the ability to create, edit, test, and publish both portal and portlet applications. Once created, these applications exist as projects in the product workbench.

Web perspective

The Portal Tools are accessible in the workbench through the Web perspective. It combines wizards and editors to assist you in developing portal and portlet applications. This perspective also provides an environment for creating other portlet-specific operations.

Development Support for WebSphere® Portal

Before working with portal or portlet projects, take note of the which target server you will be using to run either one:
Table 1. Supported Target WebSphere Portal Servers
  Portal Development Portlet Development
WebSphere Portal Test Environment
  • v5.0.2.2 & v5.0.2.3 (Windows® only)
  • v5.1 & v5.1.0.1(Windows and Linux®)
  • v5.0.2.2 & v5.0.2.3 (Windows only)
  • v5.1 & v5.1.0.1(Windows and Linux)
WebSphere Portal Server Attach
  • v5.0.2.3 & v5.1 (Windows and Linux)
  • v5.1.0.1 (Windows, Linux, iSeries™, and zOS)**
  • v5.0.2.3 & v5.1 (Windows and Linux)
  • v5.1.0.1 (Windows, Linux, iSeries, and zOS)**
**WebSphere Portal v5.1.0.1 is highly recommended. Portlets that use new APIs in WebSphere Portal v5.1.0.1 will not work with WebSphere Portal v5.1.

Whether you create a project from scratch in the workbench or import a project from WebSphere Portal, expect that you will have to deploy to the same WebSphere Portal server version as the version for which you created your project.

Tutorials

The Tutorials Gallery provides detailed tutorials to illustrate portal and portlet development. To open the gallery, select Help > Tutorials Gallery. These are the tutorials that are available for portal tools:

Sample applications

The Samples Gallery provides sample portlet applications to illustrate both portal and portlet development. You can examine these sample application projects in your own development environment.

Creating a portal or portlet application sample project is far simpler than creating one from scratch, because a wizard imports all necessary resources, including content, and the project is ready to run from your workspace.

Related concepts
Creating portlets and portlet projects
Portal development overview
Related tasks
Portlet applications
Developing portlets
Adding portlets to portal pages
Testing and debugging portlets
Publishing portlets
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