Incorporating Cooperative Portlets in Web Application Development

Portlets-based software development is gaining recognition as a key technology for the construction of robust and evolvable Web applications. Emerging portlet standards like JSR-168 or WSRP—along with commercial development tools and portal servers—enable designers to quickly develop, integrate and run “composite” Web portals, which integrate specific platforms and partners. Despite this significant progress, there is a lack of guidelines and models for addressing the development of portlet-based Web applications from a technology-independent viewpoint. This work tries to identify the main concerns involved in modeling portlets, determine the major models required to capture these concerns, and propose a way to address their integration into Web applications, from a platformindependent point of view. In so doing, we also introduce mechanisms for modeling inter-portlet communication and cooperation capabilities independently of the target portal server product.