Enhancing Portal Design

Abstract

In recent years, portals became more and more popular among organizations (Klaene, 2004). A portal provides a solution for aggregating content and applications from various information systems for presentation to the user (Linwood & Minter, 2004). Generally, portals pose three main architectural requirements (Linwood & Minter, 2004): as portals integrate heterogeneous content from various sources, a modularized architecture is necessary to allow maintainable portal systems. Second, portals require separating various concerns (Fowler, Rice, & Foemmel, 2002). For instance, the portal’s user interface is supposed to display heterogeneous content consistently on various devices, whereas the backend is supposed to syndicate content from various sources. Third, a consistent management and coordination of different information sources, portal elements, and other components is necessary for good portals design. Based on these three characteristics of portals we investigate existing portal solutions (BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Liferay Portal, eXo Platform, and JBoss Portal) to identify best practices in portal architectural design. In software engineering best practices are usually captured in patterns. The idea of using patterns for capturing best practices has been transferred from the fields of architecture and cognitive research to software engineering aiming at enhancing software development (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, 1995) in terms of reusability or using established solutions. Furthermore, we identify patterns that are not used in the analyzed portals, but may significantly contribute to good architectural design. Based on our analysis, we construct a portal pattern language to summarize existing best practices in portal architecture. Using the portal pattern language assists portal developers in evaluating specific design problems in the context of related problems. Thus, portal design decisions are made with an overall background of best practices in portal development. The article is structured as follows: first we give an overview of patterns and their use in software development. Next, we present architectural design patterns that are being applied in portal development. Based on this, we construct the core set of a portal pattern language to support design decisions for portal architectures. The article closes with a summary and outlook on future research