Portal and Portlet Interview Questions And Answers

User identification across many requests and transient information storage about the user is processed by PortletSession interace. One PortletSession is created per portlet application per client.

The PortletSession interface provides a way to identify a user across more than one request and to store transient information about that user.

The storing of information is defined in two scopes- APPLICATION_SCOPE and PORTLET_SCOPE.

APPLICATION_SCOPE: All the objects in the session are available to all portlets,servlets, JSPs of the same portlet application, by using APPLICATION_SCOPE.

PORTLET_SCOPE: All the objects in the session are available to the portlet during the requests for the same portlet window. The attributes persisted in the PORTLET_SCOPE are not protected from other web components.

The core implementation of the portal is UI, hosted by a Portal server. The HTTP requests, HTML responses, and returning appropriate portal pages are handled by the Portal UI. Enterprise Web application also can be handled by the Portal Server.

The portal architecture has the following:

Automaton Server: This server performs the management of job scheduling and implementation of a portal. It accesses all remote crawlers and profile services retrieved and stored from a remote database.

Image Server: This server hosts images and other web page content used by web services and a portal. With this configuration, large static files are to be sent directly to the browser without portal server impacts.

Search Server: This server indexes and searches all the information, applications, communities, documents, web sites through portal.

Collaboration Server: Web content publication and management for portals and web applications are supported by this server. Its functionality can be accessed by a remote web services through Enterprise Web Development kit.

Content Server: Publication and management of web content for portals and web applications along with form based publishing, branding, templates, content expiration is allowed by this server.

Authentication Server: This server handles the portal authentication for users and remote services can be accessed through EDK.

Remote Servers: Web services written using the EDK are hosted by remote servers. The servers can be in different countries, on different platforms and domains.

These are the portals are of type general interest. Yahoo!,Lycos,AOL,Freeserve,Sympatico are examples of horizontal portals.

They provide a gateway to the information pertaining to a specific industry such as insurance, banking, finance, automobile, telecom etc.

The enterprises extend to suppliers and partners by using B2B portals.

The enterprise knowledge base integration and related applications into user customizable environment is done with B2E portals. This environment is like one stop shop.

The enterprises extend to customers for ordering, billing, services by using B2C portals.

The portlet view of the portlet container is defined by PortletContext. It allows the availability of resources to the portlet. Using this context, the portlet log can be accessed and URL references to resources can be obtained. There is always only one context per portlet application per JVM.

PSML was created to allow abstraction and content structure within Jetspeed. It has two markups:

Registry markup: Describes the availability of resources to the Jetspeed engine. It supports multiple portlet registries.
Site markup: The availability of portlets are described by this markup, which is displayed for a given user.

Portlets are UI components that are pluggable and are managed, displayed in a web portal. Markup code fragments are produced by the portlets which are aggregated into a portal page. A portlet resembles an application that is web based and is hosted in a portal. Email, discussion forums, news, blogs, weather reports are some of the examples of portlets.

Highly integrated web applications’ costs reduce by portals. JBoss enables the reusability of branding and deploying new applications of composite nature.
The users and the industry can be customized, personalized their experiences in a secure and well governed manner by using JBoss portal.
JBoss incorporate components into a portal as reusable and standardized portlets, as Jboss is platform independent.
Performance and scalability is ensured.

The following are the reasons to use portals:

Unified way of presenting information from diverse sources.

Services like email, news, infotainment, stock prices and other features are offered by portals.

Provides consistent look and feel for enterprise. Eg. MSN, Google sites.

Function-based portals

Horizontal Portals:
These are the portals are of type general interest. Yahoo!,Lycos,AOL,Freeserve,Sympatico are examples of horizontal portals.

Vertical Portals
They provide a gateway to the information pertaining to a specific industry such as insurance, banking, finance, automobile, telecom etc.

User-Based Portals

B2B Portals
The enterprises extend to suppliers and partners by using B2B portals.

B2C Portals
The enterprises extend to customers for ordering, billing, services by using B2C portals.

B2E Portals
The enterprise knowledge base integration and related applications into user customizable environment is done with B2E portals. This environment is like one stop shop.

This server performs the management of job scheduling and implementation of a portal. It accesses all remote crawlers and profile services retrieved and stored from a remote database.

This server hosts images and other web page content used by web services and a portal. With this configuration, large static files are to be sent directly to the browser without portal server impacts.

This server indexes and searches all the information, applications, communities, documents, web sites through portal.

Web content publication and management for portals and web applications are supported by this server. Its functionality can be accessed by a remote web services through Enterprise Web Development kit.

Publication and management of web content for portals and web applications along with form based publishing, branding, templates, content expiration is allowed by this server.

This server handles the portal authentication for users and remote services can be accessed through EDK.

Web services written using the EDK are hosted by remote servers. The servers can be in different countries, on different platforms and domains.