Introduction
Visual aspects of a portal have a significant impact on the quality of user experience and, thus, indirectly on the success of the portal. The look and feel of the portal should be appealing and unique. Most of the times look and feel provided by the portal server does not serve the purpose. Hence, most of the portal servers provide mechanism to customize the look and feel of the portal. In Websphere portal, themes and skins provide the mechanism to customize the look and feel of the portal for an enhanced user experience. (more...)

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Coordination between portlets is a very common requirement. An example of information sharing between portlets can be a weather portlet displaying the weather information of a city and a map portlet displaying the location of the city. Since, both the portlets would be using the same zip code for a user, there should be mechanism provided by the portlal containers to allow portlets to share the zip code.

Prior to JSR 286, the support for inter portlet communication was rather minimal and information sharing between different portlets was accompalished primarily using application scoped session objects or vendor specific APIs. Both of above methods were rather problematic as in the former maintaining the uniqueness of the session attribute over a complex aaplication was a concern and in the later portability of the portlet was hampered. In order to provide coordination between portlets the Java Portlet Specification v2.0 (JSR 286) introduces the following mechanisms:

1. public render parameters in order to share render state between portlets.
2. portlet events that a portlet can receive and send. 

Let's have a look how to use the above features.
(more...)

Tags: JSR 286, portlets, websphere, websphere portal
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