Different approaches of integrating applications to a portal engine

Abstract

In profit oriented business environment professional skills and time are highly scarce and costly resources. Even though a company’s top management has the best professional skills, talent and time, if the information do not flow to them at the right time, there is a very little chance for the organization to survive in the long run. This is the time where Enterprise Application Integration made a revolutionary change across the business world. It has given the business intelligence for its management to consolidate relevant data for decision making. With the proper identification of this critical problem, many solutions popped up from around the world. Portal-portlet solution is one such approach .While integrating portlets to portals, there are many different approaches one can follow. Approaches we have discussed in this paper include, using web services as portlets, creating portlets from scratch, displaying a live web interface through a portlet, using off-the-shelf portlets, and integrating complete applications as portlets. Along with the discussion of how to use these five methods, we have also analyzed the pros and cons of the five methods along with working examples taken from the open source project, the Jefe -Software Development Workflow Management Solution (can be found in http://www.jefesoIutions.com) which is built according to these different approaches.