An Automatic Approach to Displaying Web Applications as Portlets

Abstract

Wrapping existing Web applications into portals allows to protect investment and improves user experience. Most current portlet-based portal servers provide a bridge portlet that allows to “portletize” a single Web page, that is, wrapping the whole page or a set of regions as a portlet. They use an annotation-based approach to specifying the page’s regions that must be extracted. This approach does not scale well when a whole application is to be portletized, since it requires to manually annotate each page. This paper describes the design of a bridge portlet that automatically adapts pages according to the space available in the portlet’s window. The bridge portlet delegates page adaptation to a framework that uses a chain of user-configurable “transformers”. Each transformer implements an automatic page adaptation technique. Experiments show that our approach is effective.