Portal development projects have become the centerpiece of IT acquisition and development strategy for many organizations. Enterprise integration and Web application developers predictably groan when they hear the word “portal”—nightmares of proprietary APIs, oversold features, and shoddy tool integrations. The authors of this book have been involved in over a dozen production portal efforts over the last several years. In that time, we have dealt with numerous products and frameworks, including some in-house frameworks based on servlets and JSPs. Through all of this, we began to wonder whether these commercial suites were really providing any value. We started to realize that we could put together a framework.
