Websphere portal 6.1 Web 2.0 user interface features

Learn about new portal features that pertain to the next
generation type of Web user interface.

Web technology has recently evolved towards a new direction.
In the public this evolution has been named Web 2.0. This term does
not describe a new type of technology, but has been used in a broad
manner to describe a change to a more user centered focus. Among the
benefits are improved customer and service orientation, increased
user activities, easier communication and collaboration, better usability,
faster performance, etc.
WebSphere Portal
Version 6.1
offers several new technical
features
that can be related to this next generation type of Web user interface
as they greatly enhance the portal user experience:

The portal provides improved performance, as portal pages and
portlets are rendered faster, and load is moved from the server to
the clients.

The user experience of the portal behavior is more similar to
that of a desktop, as more logic is executed on the client rather
than on the server.

Due to new APIs, developing AJAX portlets becomes easier for portlet
programmers.

Within portal, the new features are implemented as follows:

Web 2.0 portal theme with support for client side aggregation:
The
portal can use client side aggregation (CSA) instead of server side
aggregation (SSA). This has the following advantages:

Faster rendering and performance

Desktop like user experience

Existing portlets that were written to the server side programming
model can be tied in by using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
For example, such portlets can be refreshed individually rather than
requiring the refreshing of the whole page

The use of the portal Web 2.0 theme for portlets in your portal
is optional. Server side aggregation is provided as a fallback option.
For example, if the browser does not support JavaScript, the "old"
portal rendering procedure is still available.

Client side portlet programming model:
You can use the
client side programming model for your portlets. You can do everything
with the client side programming model that you can do with the server
side portlet programming model. Additionally, the client side programming
model has the following advantages:

Improved user experience by faster responses and performance,
as many interactions are processed on the client side rather than
on the server.

User customization of user profile, preferences, and changes to
the portlet state are done locally, and therefore with a faster response
time. A fragment that contains the customization is later sent to
the server and saved.

The user experience is consistent between both client side aggregation
and server side aggregation. The user cannot tell the difference between
CSA and SSA, except that CSA performs better.

Live text:
You can use live text. Live text provides elements
embedded in portal pages that become active in the browser and are
enhanced with additional functionality by JavaScript libraries. For
example, if you include portal user IDs in your portlet output and
mark them as live text, users can click on these IDs in the browser
and see a person info card or a context menu that allows them to send
a mail to the person. Live text has the following advantages:

Live text allows easier click to action.

You can adopt new portal content within your company more easily,
as it is now easier to handle portal tags. For example, you can write
tags and make them available centrally, and UI developers can reuse
these tags for in their portlets for various purposes.

Content editors can add meaningful live text elements to portlets
without requiring portlet development knowledge.

You can embed content from other sources, for example, from a
HTTP or .NET server.

REST services:

Portal now offers the following Rest services: Layout model,
Portlet model, Content model, Navigation model, Wire model, User profile.

By the use of REST services you can write your own advanced Web
application and build it on top of new REST (Representational State
Transfer) services that provide the XML request information.

REST services allow you to access portal models remotely for both
read and write access. The Navigation model allows read access only;
it is updated by changes made to the content model.

Controller SPI:
The Controller SPI is a new public portal
interface. It is not directly related to the new type of Web user
experience, but it allows you to perform certain administrative tasks
more easily.

Terminology

These are terms that are used
in the documentation for the new features:CSA
Client Side Aggregation.
This means aggregation based on
JavaScript and XSLT transformations that are executed on the client.
This is the new aggregation model that provides an improved user experience
by faster response and performance.
SSA
Server Side Aggregation.
This means aggregation based on
JSPs that are executed on the Server. This is the "old" portal aggregation
model; this still works as before.
Pure Server Side Portlet
This is a normal server side portlet that uses Java and JSPs;
it usually uses no JavaScript. Portlets that are written to the client
side model use no or few JSPs.
AJAX Portlet
This is a normal server side portlet that uses lots of JavaScript
and AJAX technologies and less Java & JSPs.
DPR
Differential Page Rendering.
This denotes the server side
rendering model that is used by the Web 2.0 theme. The concept of
DPR is to render only those parts of a portal page that were affected
by the a user interaction. For example, if a user interacts with a
single self-contained portlet that runs in the Web 2.0 theme, the
portal refreshes only this portlet rather than the entire portal page.
REST
Representational State Transfer.