1 Reply Latest reply on Aug 31, 2005 11:46 AM by roy.russo

    Reasons for using portlets - newbie

    damon311

      All,

      I understand that portlets are used primarily for content aggregation, but companies such as salesforce.com, netsuite.con and alfresco.org aren't aggregators and appear to be developed on some type of portal infrastructure. These applications provide portlets that, most likely, share a common code base, which contradicts what I'm reading "Porlets are self contained applications". If I were to develop an application that requires personalization, security features similiar to the applications listed above, does it make more sense to develop a traditional webapp or individual portlets. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

      Thanks in advance,

      Damon Henry

        • 1. Re: Reasons for using portlets - newbie

          Portals are content aggregators, using portlets to display the information from different information systems.

          So you can conceivably have a portal with sforce.com portlets that use SOAP to communicate, and then have the AlfrescoCMS Portlet using an API to communicate with some backend CMS on a remote DB.

          Your question is actually answered in the September issue of the JDJ, where Julien and I deal with this issue exactly. If you want personalization, security, clustering, caching, etc..., I believe it is probably in your best interest to utilize portal technology. This leaves you with the task of creating portlets to display the markup from whatever information systems you're interfacing with.

          With a traditional webapp, you will have to handle all the heavy-lifting by yourself.