Adding portlet capabilities

Question

Hi, I am currently working on an existing java web-app. My web app can be deployed on Tomcat, Websphere or Weblogic.

I would like to add portlet capabilities to my web app.

I know that in order to do so I have to use a portlet container or a portal.

The thing is, I would rather avoid installing a new software, I would rather use a third party which does not require installation(like jars).

What is the best software I should use? bear in mind I need a software that can be used on Weblogic, websphere or Tomcat.

Answer 1

"Portlet capabilities" is a very broad statement. Can you be more specific?

A big benefit to the portal software is that you get from the portal container the authentication/authorization, inter-portlet communication capabilities, consistent look & feel, etc out of the box.

If you are only looking for a specific subset of capabilities, you may be able to use some jar library. Otherwise I would suggest looking into BEA's AquaLogic (possibly rebranded under Oracle), IBM's WebSphere Portal or one of the other portal vendors.

Answer 2

As "Mike G" has said, "Portlet capabilities" is a very broad statement and I'm not sure of what are your needs. Anyway, you may want to look at Pluto, the reference portlet implementation for the portlet specification v2 (JSR-286)

According to its FAQ you can deploy a portlet in a standard webapp by adding listeners and filters to the web.xml of your web application.

Pluto has been tested with Tomcat: http://portals.apache.org/pluto/app-servers.html