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The Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) has certainly become one of the major enterprise software categories of the day. While the definition varies somewhat from vendor to vendor, a portal is basically a dynamic Web site containing multiple modules (often called portlets or gadgets or other goofy names), the display of which can be customized by each user. Portals contain a user security methodology, ideally including a single sign-on so users can log in to all of the modules at once.

If you need a real-world example, think of the application behind My Yahoo!. The difference would be that in most enterprise environments, corporations set up portals to enable their partners, customers, or vendors to log in and view critical information about their company. This can include information from corporate databases and other back office software, e-commerce applications, other Web-enabled applications and an unlimited amount of data from content management systems, syndication sources and more.

Numerous software vendors have portal solutions available. At the high end, Plumtree, IBM, SAP, BEA, and other similar solutions have unbelievably high license fees. Add in the costs of integration and implementing and EIP solution can easily run up in the million dollar figures. Other companies, including Microsoft and Sybase offer solutions with a lower license fee.

The reality is that many companies don't need everything these solutions offer. Most, if not all, high-end solutions have application integration features that allow for (relatively) simple integration with ERP and other back office solutions, truly a key factor for Fortune 1000 companies, as well as built-in application servers and content management solutions. For many small-to-medium enterprise companies, this is way more than is needed or even desired.

This is where the solutions reviewed below really shine (in varying degrees). Most of these solutions offer a skeletal form of what would be expected in an EIP solution, but are quite sufficient for a J2EE developer to begin their portal development process and save a significant amount of coding time working with underlying processes, such as authentication and personalization.

Enterprise Portals Key Review Factors

There are quite a few open source and free EIP solutions available, but many fewer in the J2EE world, though in many ways J2EE is a natural fit for portals. In addition to the helpful APIs for data integration (such as Java DataBase Connectivity [JDBC], Java Connector Architecture [JCA] and Java Naming Directory Interface [JNDI]), tremendous strides are being made to make it even better: a portlet API is currently under review (see JSR-168 specs) and Java's Web Services implementation are both great examples of this.

Though what every company is looking for in a portal solution varies, I reviewed these products based on the following items:

• Installation and setup
  How easy was it to install? What J2EE application servers are supported?
• Documentation
  Was there documentation? Of what quality?
• "Out of the (proverbial) box" features
  What features come with the portal without requiring additional programming? How good are the implementations? Anything expected that isn't there?
• Ease of customization
  If changes are required, how difficult is it to get into the code and make them?
• Additional bonus features
  Does the portal have any features beyond authentication and site customization?
• Portlet API
  How difficult is it to create or modify applications to be used as modules? What types of portlets can be used?

These four portal solutions seemed the best for review purposes:

• Apache Jetspeed
• jPorta
• Liferay
• RedHat CCM (formerly ArsDigita)

Apache Jetspeed

Jetspeed Web Site at Apache Jakarta

If you have done any research into J2EE portal application, Jetspeed is sure to turn up. A part of the Apache Jakarta project (Apache's J2EE segment), Jetspeed has been around since 1999 and members of the Jetspeed project are active participants in the JSR-168 portlet API specifications (other participants include IBM, BEA Systems, Borland and Epicentric). All of these factors make Jetspeed one of the better options.

Jetspeed uses XML extensively for display and back-end functionality. This includes simple use of RSS feeds and XML data into portlets and WAP cell phone site delivery. Additionally, Portal Structure Markup Language (PSML) is used to store portal-specific information including styles, personalization information and portlet registries.

The documentation is fairly good overall — improved significantly with a tutorial for the 1.4b3 release. Additionally, FAQs, sample sites, Javadocs, and other information is readily available via the Jetspeed home page.

Beyond basic user storage and preference settings and portlet integration, Jetspeed offers a number of nice features. The administrative interface is intuitive. Content can be syndicated and syndicated content can be accessed as portlets. It will be standardized on the portlet specification, enabling absorption of third-party portlet applications. Currently, numerous types of applications can be integrated as portlets including: RSS, JSP, servlets, external Web page, XSL, Velocity, a database browser, and more. Data can be integrated with Avantgo. It is also highly portable between J2EE servers using the JDK 1.2 and Servlet 2.2 specifications.

The only weakness I could find with Jetspeed was that it's not very customizable. Customizing Jetspeed requires not only knowledge of J2EE programming concepts, but also the Turbine application framework. This isn't inherently a weakness. Building applications on top of existing frameworks is laudable and is a good development strategy. However, not knowing Turbine will add to the learning curve of understanding how Jetspeed works. Note also, that some templates are written using the Velocity template engine (Turbine has Velocity built in).