An HTML fragments based approach for portlet interoperability

Abstract

Presentation level integration now becomes an important and fast growing trend in enterprise computing and portals are the mainstream to realize it. However, there is not yet a definitive mechanism to achieve interoperability between the basic components of a portal i.e. portlets, whereby HTML data flows smoothly from one portlet to a neighboring one. This paper proposes an HTML fragments based approach to achieve portlet interoperability. Fragments are a block of HTML elements, which are generated by portlets and are used to aggregate a portal page. We first construct a presentation component, which is named as ShadowComponent, for each portlet involved in a portlet interoperation using its fragments, then define a data flow process between ShadowComponents using ECA rules, and finally drive such a process by creating events to fulfill data flow between ShadowComponents. As the fragments of a portlet are synchronized with their corresponding Shadow Component, such a process enables the portlet interoperation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective in achieving portlet interoperability in portals. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.