We've all heard the terms: portals, gadgets, portlets, dashboarding. But what
does it all mean? And what role do Web services play in this exciting new
world of componentized content?
I would define "portalization" as the creation of an environment that gives
the end user one-stop shopping for actionable content and collaboration.
Portals don't create anything new; they merely give us comprehensive,
personalized access to content that may reside in any number of repositories
(see Figure 1). Moreover, portal environments benefit developers and
implementers by providing a robust set of "out of the box" tools and features
to ease application development and deployment. These tools include single
sign-on (SSO) access to virtually any authentication data source, centralized
authorization, logging and reporting, document versioning, and so on.
Content and Web services
... (more)