Getting started with Websphere portal 6.1 ....

Question

Okay, my company is a bank. The upper management is dead set on a websphere IBM portal. Apparently IBM is tossing them a bone they can't refuse. We're also a very big IBM shop anyhow with A LOT of LotusNotes applications.

In my experience with IBM, they generally make you go through them to learn their stuff. I'm having to sort of jump in head first so that I can give an overview of the product to the development team. I'm specifically trying to find free portal development resources. Heck a hello world portal would be fine. Also, when I say portal, this also includes portlets.

Another issue is that I learn best by doing. Can someone point me to a freetrial link or something for websphere portal? Really, I just need anything that will let me get my feet wet with the sort of coding that I'll need to do for the actual portal.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions are all welcome in any way/shape/form.

Answer 1

Check out the IBM Redbooks and online help for documentation and development guides. Try the Rational Application Developer trial for portlet development - this comes with a WPS test server.

Answer 2

If I remember right from the days I worked with it, RAD have some sample "hello world" projects for WPS. You can also import sample portlets from here.