A portal is a J2EE Web application that provides an interactive
framework where developers can associate many portlet applications. The term
portal is also used to refer to the site that contains these applications.
You can use the Rational® Software Development Platform to create,
customize, test, debug, and deploy your portal. The tool that allows you to
develop the appearance, navigation, and content of your portal is called Portal
Designer. Portal development support is provided for WebSphere® Portal v5.0 and v5.1 servers.
For more information, refer to Portal Tools overview.
Portal projects
A portal project is the file collection
that you create for both the structural and aesthetic framework of your portal.
The basic elements of the project are these:
- Project name
- Server type definition
- Default theme
- Default skin
The recommended method for creating a portal project is to import a
portal site from a WebSphere Portal server. This ensures that you
begin working with the most current portal configuration for your version
of WebSphere Portal.
Customizing a portal site
There are several aspects
that contribute to the visual design of your portal:
- Navigation and Layout- organize the hierarchy of your portal by
adding labels, pages, and URLs. Edit the layout of your portlets within your
portal pages.
- Themes and Skins - the graphic design of your portal is defined
by the themes and skins you apply to it.
- Styles - styles apply to the visual use of text, tables and images
within your portal. CSS Designer gives you the ability to edit and create
style sheets that produce a consistent format throughout your portal themes
and skins.
- Portlets - the content within your portal depends on the portlets
and portlet applications that you insert into each page. Within a portal page,
portlets are separated from each other by skins
Testing, debugging, or profiling a portal
You can
test or debug a portal project using the workbench. These tasks involve running
a portal on a server, either on the test environment within the workbench
(local), or on separate server (remote, or server attach).
Deploying a portal
Deployment refers to the process
of moving your portal project from your workspace to a staging or production
server. You can deploy your project to the server automatically (Deploy),
or you can move it manually (Export).