IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 supports the newest portal open standards, such as JSR286 and WSRP 2.0 and leverages Web 2.0 capabilities. This article introduces some of the highlights of the new version and provides references to other resources where you can find more information about the new features.
Figure 1: Web 2.0 Theme Pack -- The use of the Client Side Aggregation architecture in your portal is optional. Server Side Aggregation is still supported in Version 6.1.
Figure 2: Semantic Tag -- The content displayed in the Live Text menu can come from any Web content management system, static HTML pages, application portlets, etc.
Figure 3: Live Text with Click to Action -- When the user selects the second option, the order details display in the Standard Order Detail portlet.
Web 2.0 Portal theme
WebSphere Portal 6.1 comes with a new Web 2.0 Theme out of the box (figure 1). The new theme uses AJAX, XSLT, and a new aggregation model called Client-Side Aggregation (CSA).
The Portal Web 2.0 Theme is a specialized theme which only renders the parts of the page that are changed from a user interaction. So, if there are four different portlets on a page and a user interacts with a single portlet on the page, only the portlet the user interacts with is updated. If a user selects a new page on the Portal navigation links, only the affected navigation elements are updated, and the new page contents are rendered. Rather than updating and refreshing the entire page on every user interaction, the CSA aggregator only updates the parts of the page that changed.
Client-Side Aggregation (CSA) reduces server-side processing and improves performance by offloading the page and portlet rendering from the server to the client, providing a richer and more responsive user experience. Previous versions of WebSphere Portal supported Server-Side Aggregation model only where JSPs were executed on the Server.
Live Text (Semantic Tags)
This new feature provides a simple way of adding semantic tags (keywords) to the HTML markup to simplify information discovery, retrieval, and navigation. For instance, in figure 2, a Live Text "pop-up" presents access to relevant information, such as e-mail address, job role of the document author, when the user clicks on the link "Paula Dantas" in the portlet.
Figure 3 is another example of Live Text, showing its integration with Click-to-Action which enables cross-portlet interaction.
A user clicks on an Order item in the Standard Orders portlet and a Live Text menu displays with two options: Show Account Details and Show Order Details.
Web Application Integrator
With Web Application Integrator, you can integrate external Web applications with WebSphere Portal providing a way of easily embedding existing Web applications into WebSphere Portal with no portlet development required.
You perform this integration by "injecting" Portal navigation markup into the external Web application. As the Portal navigation is displayed in the Web application, the user experience suggests the user is still in the Portal environment even though he is, in reality, natively browsing the external Web application. Because the Portal navigation is displayed on the Web application, the user can navigate back to Portal by clicking on any Portal page link.
Note: Web Application Integrator for WebSphere Portal Server 6.0.x is available for download in the IBM portlet catalog.