Portal development overview

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 Rational® Developer 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 in Rational Developer 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 use Rational Developer to deploy your project to the server automatically (Deploy), or you can move it manually (Export).

Related concepts
Portal Tools overview
Portlet development overview
Related tasks
Developing portals
Customizing portal sites
Testing and debugging portals
Publishing portals

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