Portal Modularization Tool

• US 20140026026A1
• Filed: 07/17/2012
• Published: 01/23/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 07/17/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Conduent Business Services, LLC (Conduent, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Xerox Business Services, LLC (Conduent, Inc.)
• Inventors: Shikari, Faiyaz, Sharma, Dhiraj
• Granted Patent: US 9,268,870 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/234
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/958 Organisation or management of web site content, e.g. publishing, maintaining pages or automatic linking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/103 Formatting, i.e. changing of presentation of documents automatic justification G06F40/189; automatic line break hyphenation G06F40/191
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/166 Editing, e.g. inserting or deleting
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/36 Software reuse
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/60 Software deployment

Abstract

An apparatus for developing web portals comprising a portal decomposer configured to generate a plurality of modules from a web portal, a portal composer configured to generate a plurality of portal versions using a plurality of selections of the modules, wherein the selections of modules comprise a local module deployed on a host of the web portal and a remote module deployed on a second host coupled to the host of the web portal. Also disclosed is an application for decomposing and composing web portals, comprising a plurality of instructions that cause a processor to decompose a first web portal into a plurality of portal modules; and compose a second web portal that is a version of the first portal from a set of selected modules from the portal modules.

Claims

1. An apparatus for developing web portals comprising:

a portal decomposer configured to generate a plurality of modules from a web portal;

a portal composer configured to generate a plurality of portal versions using a plurality of selections of the modules,

wherein the selections of modules comprise a local module deployed on a host of the web portal and a remote module deployed on a second host coupled to the host of the web portal.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the portal composer deploys the local module at the host of the web portal and the remote module at the second host.

3. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the portal composer generates some of the portal versions using less than all of the modules.

4. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the web portal is an International Business Machine (IBM) Websphere portal server version 7 definition, and wherein the modules comprise a plurality of software components including themes, skins, pages, portlets, wires, and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) mappings.

5. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the web portal comprises a plurality of portal pages that include a plurality of portlets and a plurality of Java Specification Request (JSR)-286 events.

6. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the web portal comprises a plurality of portal pages that include a plurality of portlets and a plurality of Web Service Remote Portlets (WSRPs).

7. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the web portal defines a web portal application for processing healthcare benefits claims, and wherein the modules comprise a contact module, claims module, a member module, and a provider module.

8. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the web portal is exported in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) access template (XAT) file that is received by the portal decomposer.

9. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the portal versions are imported from corresponding Extensible Markup Language (XML) access template (XAT) files that are sent by the portal composer.

10. An application for decomposing and composing web portals comprising a plurality of instructions that cause a processor to:

decompose a first web portal into a plurality of portal modules; and

compose a second web portal that is a version of the first portal from a set of selected modules from the portal modules.

11. The application of claim 10 further comprising:

parsing the set of selected modules to determine any gaps in the second web portal due to missing portal modules in the set of selected modules; and

filling any detected gaps in the second web portal to account for the corresponding missing portal modules.

12. The application of claim 10 further comprising deploying the set of selected modules at a local host, one or more remote hosts, or both.

13. The application of claim 12, wherein the selected modules are deployed at the one or more remote hosts using one or more corresponding Web Service Remote Portlet (WSRP) specifications.

14. The application of claim 12, wherein deploying the selected modules at the local host and one or more remote hosts eliminates bad neighbor syndrome where only one or more selected modules at one host that fails are affected and the remaining selected modules deployed elsewhere remain functional.

15. A method for decomposing a web portal comprising:

decomposing a web portal that comprises a plurality of portal pages including a plurality of portlets and other software components into a plurality of modules; and

maintaining the modules in a plurality of corresponding module files to generate subsequently a plurality of web portal packages that comprise at least some of the portlets and other software components of the web portal.

16. The method of claim 15 further comprising deploying the module files at a plurality of servers.

17. The method of claim 15, wherein the web portal is structured into a content tree comprising a root content node and a plurality of content leafs that include themes, skins, pages, portlets, wires, and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) mappings, and wherein the modules are page hierarchy based modules that correspond to the immediate children of the root content node.

18. The method of claim 15, wherein the web portal is structured into a content tree comprising a root content node and a plurality of content leafs that include themes, skins, pages, portlets, wires, and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) mappings, and wherein the modules are web archive based modules that each comprises the content leafs including one or more portlets that are defined in a corresponding Web Archive (WAR) file.

19. The method of claim 15, wherein the modules are generated based on a pre-determined module definition that selects a plurality of components of the web portal that is considered a functional unit, and wherein the modules are maintained in a plurality of corresponding Extensible Markup Language (XML) files.

20. A method for composing a web portal comprising:

composing a web portal from a subset of modules selected from a plurality of available modules that comprise a plurality of portal pages including a plurality of portlets and other software components; and

filling any gaps in the web portal that occur due to excluding in the selected subset of modules one or more of the available modules.

21. The method of claim 20 further comprising deploying the subset of modules at a plurality of servers.

22. The method of claim 20, wherein the gaps are filled using a null module stub approach comprising:

implementing a portal definition verification pass to identify any missing available modules associated with missing portlets and wires from the portal definition for the web portal;

adding a null portlet in the portal definition for any missing portlet associated with a missing module; and

adding a null portlet page comprising a null wire portlet for any missing page and portlet side of a wire associated with a missing module.

23. The method of claim 22, wherein the added null portlet presents details for upselling the missing module.

24. The method of claim 20, wherein the gaps are filled using a silent stub approach comprising:

implementing a portal definition verification pass to identify any missing available modules associated with portlets and wires from the portal definition for the web portal;

removing any portlet associated with a missing module; and

removing any page and wire associated with a missing module.