Towards a Generic and Adaptable J2EE-Based Framework for Engineering Personalizable "My" Portals

There exist many portal servers that support the construction of personalizable “My” portals, that is, portals that allow the user to have one or more personal pages composed of personalizable services. The main drawback of current portal servers is its lack of generality and adaptability. This paper presents the approach we are following in the new version of MyPersonalizer, a J2EE-based framework for engineering personalizable “My” portals. MyPersonalizer is being structured according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, providing generic and adaptable model and controller layers that implement the typical use cases of a My portal. The controller layer is built upon Jakarta Struts, “de facto” MVC framework for J2EE web applications and is tightly integrated with it. So, in order to build a My portal, developers implement the portal view as JSP pages by using Struts and JSTL tags, integrate personalized service responses, specify portal configuration and maybe redefine some policies if necessary.