Portletizing web applications

Resumo

Corporate Portals are becoming a popular tool to provide employees what they need whenever they need it, as a single point of access to improve productivity. Thus, distinct units of information and applications share their rendering space on portal pages. Now applications become components, and the portal becomes the key to the integration of the applications. These applications are named Portlets and standards that provide interoperability between portal vendors exist. Information Extraction (I.E.) refers to the ability to automatically extract structured information from unstructured, user-oriented documents (such as HTML documents). The use of I.E. with document search and navigation gives birth to Wrappers. Wrapping Technologies are focused on repurposing existing content and applications into new means of interaction with them. This thesis covers Portletization as the integration of existing web applications in portals as portlets through the use of Wrapping Technologies; fostering application reuse and reducing integration costs. Integration here is understood in two different ways: (1), working out the differences in context and characteristics between portlets and applications, enabling existing web applications to be used as portlets; and (2), piping information among applications.