| Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide | 
 enlarge | Authors: W. Clay Richardson, Donald Avondolio, Joe Vitale, Peter Len, Kevin T. Smith
Publisher: Wrox
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $1.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 673870
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 456
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0471469513
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780471469513
ASIN: 0471469513
Publication Date: February 27, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new, never opened in stock and ships today!
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 18 | | NEXT » |
 very unfortunate April 5, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I concur with just about every other reviewer. At a time when there's such a dearth of introductory material on jsr 168, I expected a lot from this book, but unfortunately got very little out of it, and worse yet, I have had to un-learn some of the practices I picked up from this book.
I got really excited looking over the first chapter's example portlet -- a Lucene search portlet. But there are some glaring mistakes in the code. One fundamental mistake I see a lot is their use of request.getParameter("mode") to retrieve the portlet mode, when it's much better to use request.getPortletMode(). The mode parameter is not always set and can sometimes be null; it's much safer to use the getPortletMode() method. In general, I would have liked more explanation in chapter one on jsr 168 basics. There simply aren't enough texts out there that do this well.
But I do laud the fundamental premise of the book -- using powerful, mature open-source projects (apache lucene and james) -- to build a portal. Search and mail are the foundation of any commercial portal and I think the open source alternatives compete well here; however, they haven't been tied into a framework that you can deploy out of the box, so I think the authors tried to meet a very real need.
 Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: JavaTM Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide October 9, 2005
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sorry for bad review but book is not for Professional but novice users and managers.
Just like a Poorly Architeted Portal - A Framework without Much Substance August 5, 2005
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Enterprise portal based on Portlet is very flexible for rapid development. A good practice is to plug-in quickly a variety of portlets as placeholders to compose a mock-up portal as the baseline for further detailed discussion with stakeholders. Of course, all the parties involved know that the mock-up presented is still a mock-up and they expect there is a production release at the end.
This book is also a mockup, though we readers did not know this until we paid this book as the final deliverable.
This book has two parts. The first part, Open Source Portals, contains 6 chapters. Chapter 1, The Java Portlet API (JSR 168), mainly lists lengthy attribute names and descriptions for CSS Style Definitions and for User Information Attributes, without much explanation. Much better material may be found online just a google away. Many pages are given to the code of a sample portlet. The explanation is as much as the comments made by poor programmer, almost none. Why do we readers have to pay in order to have the pleasure to read poorly commented coding? The sample is built upon Apache Lucene API, though it has not been introduced at this stage at all.
The remaining 5 chapters in the first part introduce several subjects that may be used to support a portal development, researching with Lucene, messaging with Apache James (for mail), object to relational mapping with Apache OJB, content management with Jakarta's Slide, portal security. The authors take these pieces of the components of their portal framework. A problem with this book is that the authors keep introduce a large amount of terminologies and software components without much insight. For instance, they never bother to explain why they use Apache OJB in their portal framework. Isn't Hibernate also a popular O-R mapping tool? I wish the authors explained to us other alternatives and at least some hints of why they choose certain open source tools instead of the others in portal development. This is particular important for using open source tools since there are often many alternatives.
The second part is titled How to Build a Portal. Again, you will discover many placeholders without much substance. For instance, under Design Pattern Consideration in Your Portal, nine standard design patterns are presented, several lines of description for each. The authors just do not bother to explain why they consider these 9 patterns are important for portal development and other are not, or they merely provides a partial list to demonstrate design patterns are still important to portal development as it is for any other development. I will give you another example here. Chapter is devoted to Effective Client-Side Development Using JavaScript. The coverage here is just common for any web development. I do not understand why the authors make this subject an entire chapter, in particular since this book covers a large amount of subjects in a moderate 400 pages, and in particular some fundamental subjects are still missing, such as the coverage of portal servers/containers.
I am not kidding. Open source portal/containers are not covered much in this book for Professional Portal development. Open source portal servers are briefly mentioned in the introductory part in about one page, each in several lines. Apache Jakarta Pluto is covered in a bonus chapter on the book's companion Web site. Apache Jakarta Jetspeed is mentioned in 7 linesJ. Liferay Enterprise Portal is introduced in 15 lines. This books give more coverage on EXo Portal. is introduced in 8 lines and it is introduced briefly again at Chapter 9, when a moderate Portlet is demonstrated.
According to the publisher, "An outstanding team of authors provides a complete tutorial and reference guide to Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, and Slide, taking you step-by-step through constructing and deploying portal applications." The book fails to deliver this promise.
 An important text for portal development June 9, 2005
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book helped me overcome some difficulties I had in my new portal development tasks and in understanding some of the basic concepts needed for developing portlets within/without a portal framework. This book is definitely worth a look for those interested in portal creation.
Rip off April 25, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
As others have noted this book is a rip off. Of the 12 Chapters 6 are completly unrelated to Portal deveelopment. Chapter 2 is Searching with Lucene, 3 - Messaging with Apache James, 4 Object to Relational Mapping with Jakarta OJB and 5 is Content Management with Jakarta Slide.
In fairness there are a couple of useful sections - but overall its quite incomplete.
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