PortletBridge: An open source solution to transform your website into portlets

Nowadays the online web world is the richest source of information & data diversified all around the web. We, the web users are always eager to get unified information in a very personalized way over consolidated view. I have experienced that the web contents accessed most are the best relevant information & of course organized systematically to have an easy-to-come-across approach.
Consequently, with the growing needs of web masters to manage online data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views, web developers offered a new tool, the web Portals/Portlets.

The Portlet specification defines a portlet as a "Java-technology-based web component, managed by a portlet container that processes requests and generates dynamic content." Portlets are pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page.

A web Portal is website that typically provides personalized capabilities and offer content aggregation from different sources such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, game, chat, weather, and entertainment to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content with single sign on. A portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet. Hence a collection of portlets resembles a web-based application that is hosted in a portal. It provides a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Being contemporary web information presentation layer, portals are the key strategy to secure the user-base and lengthen the time a user stayed on the site. But developing a portal can cost a lot & during a market slowdown, it will be a curse. Even in a growing market, one may think before spending money to have a portal based application, moreover, when one is having a full-fledge website working fine.

For the cooperates who own running web sites and still want to have a portlet based web site can integrate with the PortletBridge, an open source & easy to use Java-technology-based package that generates dynamic contents.

The PortletBridge application is a web clipping proxy portlet that allows regular web site to be hosted as portlets. Using XSLT for web clipping the PortletBridge portlet can transform any sites hosted over HTTP, including J2EE, ASP, PHP etc. It creates a JSR-168 portlet that can proxy and rewrite content from a downstream web site.

Portlet Bridge requires Java 1.4 or above and should run without any specific configuration. All you need to do is deploy it into your portal and then edit the preferences.

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