Essential reading for every software engineer, architect, programmer, system designer, and portlet developer who is confronted with the task of building a portal for their organization, this guide to IBM WebSphere Portal covers the fundamental aspects of the WebSphere portlet API and demonstrates portlet development by example, with working sample portlets throughout the text. The first to specifically address the topic of programming portlets, this book teaches in detail how to create these reusable components while examining the various facilities IBM WebSphere Portal offers. Portal servers deliver rich content, provide collaboration capability, and allow application access that is relevant to an end user via the Internet. A portlet is one small but critical piece of an overall portal composed of many portlets. Portlets can be an article, like in a magazine, or a column, like in a newspaper. WebSphere Portal Server provides a rich and robust horizontal framework for building portals that can meet the needs of any enterprise. Central to the WebSphere Portal framework is the portlet API. The portlet API provides the necessary life cycle methods that developers can use to facilitate the integration of back-end applications and data.