WebSphere Portlet Factory is a powerful and flexible tool for rapidly building portlets on top of a service-oriented architecture. Developers are able to quickly and easily leverage their company's core assets, automatically assembling them into custom, high-value portlets.

Within this IBM Redbooks publication, we show you specific techniques and a best practices approach for developing portlets using WebSphere Portlet Factory. Using a fictitious company scenario, we discuss how to build a Customer Self Service and Customer Representative application. Within this context, we cover the following topics:

- Installing and configuring the Portlet Factory development Environment,

- How to create and consume data services from SQL, Domino and a Web Service,

- Step by step guidance for creating the portlets and enabling inter-portlet communication,

- Advanced UI design techniques, including the use of AJAX for type ahead functionality and working with the DoJo Builders,

- Enabling the use of Profiling

- Deployment Production Considerations, and

- Troubleshooting and Debugging techniques

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Scenario Introduction

Chapter 3. Creating Projects

Chapter 4. Data Services: overview and interface definition

Chapter 5. Creating Data Services: access to back-end systems

Chapter 6. Creating Portlets - Making it work

Chapter 7. Creating Portlets - Designing the UI

Chapter 8. Enabling Portlet Communication

Chapter 9. Customizing the application using profiling

Chapter 10. Creating the Go Shopping Portlet

Chapter 11. Production Deployment

Chapter 12. Troubleshooting, Debugging & Error Handling

Appendix A. Setting up the Environment

Appendix B. Creating a web service using WebSphere Portlet Factory

Appendix C. Remote Deployment

Appendix D. Configuring the RAD Unified Test Environment

Appendix E. Considerations for WAS CE

Appendix F. Execution Processing

Appendix G. Source Control and Team Development

Appendix H. Additional material