Turning portlets into services: the consumer profile

Portlets strive to play at the front end the same role that Web services currently enjoy at the back end, namely, enablers of application assembly through reusable services. However, it is wellknown in the component community that, the larger the component, the more reduced the reuse. Hence, the coarse-grained nature of portlets (they encapsulate also the presentation layer) can jeopardize this vision of portlets as reusable services. To avoid this situation, this work proposes a perspective shift in portlet development by introducing the notion of Consumer Profile. While the user profile characterizes the end user (e.g. age, name, etc), the Consumer Profile captures the idiosyncrasies of the organization through which the portlet is being delivered (e.g. the portal owner) as far as the portlet functionality is concerned. The user profile can be dynamic and hence, requires the portlet to be customized at runtime. By contrast, the Consumer Profile is known at registration time, and it ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Oscar Díaz, Salvador Trujillo, Sandy Pérez
• Keywords: Family Portlets, Internet Technology, Portlet Consumers Registry, Portlet Functionality, WWW 2007