My Portal Project

As part of the greater strategy of portal implementation, one must always have an eye on portal performance. Poorly designed portlets, or portlets with slow response time will quickly slow down not only a single page, but the entire portal.

With the idea of not to migrate applications to the portals native language, but to have the portal interact with remote applications via XML, comes the prospect of using AJAX technologies to allow a user to interact with an application without posting/getting pages to the portal server over and over.

AJAX is one of those things where someone tacked on an acronym to a collection of pre-existing technologies and subsequently brought the idea to a greater population. Basically, you can use JavaScript to make requests to a remote server without a page refresh. The response from the server, typically XML, is then parsed and the page updated via JavaScript or DHTML.

So on a portal page which could contain alot of portlets, a user could interact with a single application portlet, exchanging data with a remote application, without the entire page having to be re-computed by the portal server.

Over at the Ajaxion Blog I came across a link to this site where each portlet has its own lifecycle and refreshes totally independent of the page container. It looks odd as the page loads, but that can be fixed with some slight of hand.

Here is the site that I first found when I wanted to start learning about AJAX.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.