Hi,

we are planning to build an intranet portal where we want to integrate some existing web applications without changing them too much. One idea that came up was to "embed" these applications into portlets, so it would be easy to deploy them later.

Do you know of any simple way to do this?

The very rough idea (I do not have much knowlegde of portlets yet) was to just put an <iframe> into the portlets area where the application is shown. This way I would have almost no effort changing the existing application and all the nice features I get using a portal/portlet framework.

Does this sound reasonable? Are there other solutions for his problem? Any comments appreciated!

TIA

  Jonas

The iframe solution is okay too - but remember that with iframes you may get UI issues, authentication issues etc

One easy way (and ugly) is to "screen scrape" an existing web-app - open sympony used to provide a scraper - which basically looked for a start-tag and an end-tag from another web-page.

I am curious to understand what your requirements are for making the application into a portlet in the first place. We have a client that has several J2EE applications that are being considered for migration into portlets but I do not see the value in doing so. Clearly simple apps like news, announcements I see the value as portlets but not full blown applications.

If access to the applications is controlled from the portal via a hyperlink the portal can serve as a spring board for the applications without being migrated into Portlets.

If all your applications are integrated into the portal and your portal goes down you loose access to everything whereas with applications you can seperate them and via use of Single Sign-on still have access to them in the event of portal failure. What am I missing here?

the very first thing your application have tohave is real dynamic linking or absolute linking as the portlet have not a defined location,REMEMBER no relative links in portlet