Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Access Management for “Portal” Applications
Many organisations have “portals”, which are gateways that aggregate and
provide a common point of access to a group of business applications. IAM is
expected to provide security for portals as well. It's important to realise that
there is a portal
function
that is different from a specialised model that is
portal
technology
.
The portal function is a simple one of providing some form of aggregation, so
that a user sees all their required functions in the same place and they can
follow links from that starting point to do those specialised tasks. Many so-
called “portals” are nothing but menu pages on websites that provide simple
hyperlinks to other full-fledged web applications.
Portal technology, on the other hand, refers to a programming model
defined by two Java standards, - JSR-168 and JSR-286. Business functions
cannot be standalone web applications in this model. To be able to run
inside a portal, they must be written as specialised components called
portlets
. Among other peculiar requirements, portlets must emit fragments
of HTML instead of complete web pages and conform to a complex, multi-
phase event behaviour defined by these standards. There is also an adjunct
standard called WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) that allows
portlets and portals of different technology families (i.e., Java and .NET) to
interoperate.
Fig 35: Portals and IAM
