Historically, the progress of Web-based applications and the diverse nature
of information from different Web applications ushered in the need to unify
content to a single point of access: the Web portals.
There are several Web portal frameworks being developed in both the J2EE and
.NET camp to unify Web content and provide end users with a more efficient
environment to interact with the Web.
The portal technology is based on the notion of a portal container that
provides the basic infrastructure to host a load of disparate applications
wrapped up as portlets.
To facilitate cross-vendor Web application deployment as portlets in portal
containers, a number of specs were written with several implementations in
J2EE and .NET, but there still was no way to host content from both J2EE- and
.NET-based Web applications in the same portal container.
To fix this issue, WSRP ... (more)
Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also
comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to
back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk
to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the
Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either
in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed
to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects
it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects w... (more)
Historically we have seen the success of plug-in based products like Mozilla
Firefox and Eclipse IDE where new content can be plugged-in at runtime to
augment software functionality. In plug-in based architecture there is
always a base container implementation where other components are added as
plug-ins to extend its functionality; however, in these solutions there are
no extension points exposed in added plug-in components to interact or bind
them together. In this article I discuss the details of a pattern that is a
hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate... (more)
Alex Nhu works as a manager, UI Development at Packeteer Inc. He has more than 11 years of work experience designing and architecting complex server-side J2EE and XML applications. He loves developing Web applications with Flex now after getting a taste of developing UI using other RIA platforms.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
