Amber Roy-Chowdhury

This article describes an easy-to-implement scheme for user-driven, on-the-glass integration of portlets using features of the WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) portlet programming model. Users can transfer information displayed on one portlet to another portlet on the same page, which then acts on it and refreshes the display with new content. Portlet developers can select specific fields in their portlets as useful to other portlets within the same page. For example, a travel-booking portlet exposes the name of the destination city as a source of information. A weather portlet within the same portal application can then be asked to display weather information for that city. The entire interaction is driven visually on the browser window with a user interface model. The scenario we'll use has been modified to support such user-driven integration of diverse portlets. W... (more)