Mastering IBM WebSphere Portal: Expert Guidance to Build and Deploy Portal Applications

Rating:
Summary: Might well be the best WebSphere Portal book out there...
Review: WebSphere Portal (WP) is becoming a major technology, but there's still not a lot of books out there to help you understand and implement it. I had a chance to review Wiley's Mastering IBM WebSphere Portal by Ron Ben-Natan, Richard Gornitsky, Tim Hanis, and Ori Sasson. Having done some work with Portal, I can say I wish I had this book a lot sooner. It would have saved me some headaches.



The chapter breakdown: Introducing WP; Installing WP on Windows 2000 Server; Installing WP on Linux; Customizing WP; Installing WP Tools and Problem Analysis; Migrating to WP Version 5.0; Defining Portals and Pages; Tailoring the Portal Web Design; WP Personalization; Portal Administration; Document and Content Management within WP; Adding Collaboration and Search Components to Your Portals; Extending Portal Functionality: Portlets; Portlet Programming Model and API; WebSphere Portlet Development Environment; Portlet Development; Portlet Interactive Debug and JSR 168 Example; Struts Portlet Framework; Implementing Authentication for Large Enterprises; Integrating Security and Identity Management Tools with WP; Designing High Availability into Your Portal Server; WP Support for Web Services and Remote Portlets; Integrating External Applications with WP; Supporting Mobile Users; Index



As you can see from the list of chapters, there's a lot of information that spans many different roles. There's the administration processes, the development processes, security processes, and architecture. Regardless of what part of WP you are dealing with, you'll find something of interest in here. The authors are well-versed and experienced in WP developement and implementation, so it's not a rehash of "here's what the instructions tell you to do". Plenty of illustrations and code samples will help you quickly get to where you need to be.



From a development perspective (since that's my area of expertise), I appreciated the different looks at portlet development. I know that Struts is becoming a de facto standard, but it's hard to find information on how to integrate that into a portlet program. They cover that here. They also cover the differences between the WP API and the JSR 168 standards for development, which is very nice.



Basically, it's one of the most up-to-date books on WP that is currently on the market, and between it and the IBM redbooks you should be able to come up with a successful portal implementation.