Designing a Portal User Interface

The WebLogic Workshop Portal Extensions let you surface your applications in portlets and arrange those portlets on pages (that use tabs or other navigation functionality) within a portal. Portals can use different looks and feels, and you can let users customize their portal desktops by adding their own pages, adding and arranging portlets, and changing the look and feel of the desktop.

The following illustration shows a JSP application before and after it is surfaced in a portal interface. The JSP application that took up an entire browser window can be displayed in a portlet, along with other applications.

Displaying applications in a portal environment is flexible and powerful, but it also potentially reduces the amount of screen real estate available for your applications (moving from an entire browser window to a Portlet window), especially when mobile devices access your portals.

Portlet real estate depends on the page layout used and the number of portlets on a page. For example, a page layout can use a single table cell to render a single large portlet, or a layout can contain a number of rows and columns and render multiple, smaller portlets. So JSP and HTML design must account for that reduced real estate. For example, the content or functionality of a single JSP or HTML page may need to be divided between two or more portlets, which requires the creation of more JSPs or HTML pages.

In addition to basic portal design considerations, you may also want to consider accessibility design issues. For more information, see Building User Interfaces to Address Accessibility Guidelines.

To learn more about building portal interfaces, see Developing Portal User Interfaces.