Articles

Placing new tooling on existing worksites en masse is a classic Sakai administration problem. Creating new worksites as copies of other sites is easy enough, but subsequent changes to the original site are not reflected in the copy.

A discussion of advantages of choosing the uPortal platform for implementing a campus portal.

A previous article explained the basics of developing a Portlet. This article will introduce the Spring Portlet MVC Framework for developing Portlets. Specifically, this article will help you create a new Portlet using the SimpleFormController available in the Spring Portlet MVC Framework.

Recently I was asked by University of Colorado System to develop a portlet-based user interface for their User Impersonation capabilities. These tools allow special users -- developers and help desk staff -- to assume the identity of another user within the portal.

This article describes the Toro Portal Installer workflow and each configuration item.

The installer was implemented using an open source project called AntInstaller, which is a nice application that uses Ant to perform the installation tasks. For further information about AntInstaller, visit their Sourceforge page (http://antinstaller.sourceforge.net/).

One of the limitations of the JSR 168 Portlet Specification is not allowing the Portlet to serve any binary content, or content that does not get marked up by the portal. Portlet developers must still develop workarounds to address this need, until the new Portlet specification (JSR 286) is finalized and implemented by different portal vendors. One work around is to use a Servlet to serve the content. This article will demonstrate how to do this.

As a web developer, there are several things that you should know about developing portlets that make it different than normal web development.

This article will extend and expand upon the article How Portlet Development is Different from Servlet Development.

Today I wrapped up some work I had been preparing for the uPortal 2.6 release: a new Portlet Application deployment tool. Readers who attended my talk at the JA-SIG conference in Denver last week on Cernunnos may recognize it.

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide step-by-step setup instructions for a uPortal development environment for use in developing Portlets. The instructions will be geared towards users of the Microsoft Windows XP platform, but the concepts should be applicable for other operating systems including UNIX.

One difficulty in developing Portlets are the lack of tutorial guides. And when you find a tutorial it generally is very specific to one portal. This article will demonstrate the steps needed to create a very basic Portlet using uPortal. However, the steps in this guide that are specific to uPortal will be kept to a minimum.