Definition: What is a Portal based Application Development

The adoption of Portals is increasing with many organisations commencing Portal projects and most IT vendors providing development tools and support within their application servers.  Portals are likely to build on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the associated benefits of re-use for application development. 

This document does not focus on products, rather on architectural approaches to delivery of IT applications.  Portal based application development is a better way of delivering web based applications.  Just as SOA is a service oriented approach quite different to the traditional software development methodology, the Portal based approach looks at provision of the smallest distinct application possible (Portlet) which includes presentation, business layers and data layers.  The Portal framework and architecture supports this, within a highly flexible application delivery mechanism.

Because these building blocks are loosely coupled and highly configurable, it is possible to use them in many applications and potentially within many parts of a single application.  The potential for re-use is substantial.  In addition, the cost of developing Portal based applications is potentially lower,  as Portal Platforms provide frameworks, architectures and Portlets that all applications need and benefit from. 

If the total cost of ownership is considered, the cost of maintenance and modification to the application delivered must be included and the cost of modifying and maintaining a Portal based application is lower.  The reason for this is that often modification can be made purely through configuration rather than redevelopment.

Of course this is new technology and does have some obstacles.  It is changing, it includes some additional security risk, it includes up front costs for Portal platforms and standards are yet to be completely ratified. 

One of the biggest challenges to Portal deployment is political, involving data ownership, Portlet ownership, data aggregation and paying for shared infrastructure such as the Portal platform and shared Portlet costs.

If we are developing Web based applications, we should be using Portal based development to reduce development and maintenance costs.  Few would argue that object oriented software development is not worthwhile, the same will be true of Portal based development in the years to come.