Enhancing your portal using Google Gadgets with WebSphere Portal V6.0
Introduction
WebSphere Portal V6.0 provides users with personalized and customizable access to information, business processes, and applications. Through WebSphere Portal’s composite application technology, users can create business mashups consisting of one or more pages of aggregated portlets which can interact with each other in a contextual fashion. You can integrate into composite applications local portlets that are implemented to the Java Portlet API (JSR 168) specification as well as remote portlets that are invoked as Web Services for Remote Portlets according to the OASIS WSRP standard.
Now, with the introduction of the IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets, you can also integrate Google Gadgets into your portal-based business mashups. All application function and user interfaces of Google Gadgets are provided by gadget services run and operated by Google or third parties. WebSphere Portal acts as an intermediary, providing customizable, personalized, and managed access of users to portal pages and enterprise mashups, which can include Google Gadgets and many other components. In that capacity, WebSphere Portal stores and manages all customization information for the integrated gadgets. For example, if a user employs a “maps” gadget, then its customization (such as the address to show in the map, the rendering style for the map, and so on) is stored and managed in the portal database.
This article briefly explains the key concepts behind gadgets. Next, it provides an overview of how the integration of Google Gadgets into WebSphere Portal works from a user point of view and from an architectural perspective. Then, it describes the benefits this capability provides to portal customers.