[.ca] Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: ... (ISBN 0471469513)

Loaded with Knowledge!!!:
This book covers JSR168 in great detail and also shows the reader how to use some of the most popular open source tools on the market. These tools are geared towards what a programmer might need for portal development. Terrific book! I highly recommend it!

Incomplete look at Portal development:
There seems to be a new breed of technical cookbook book that involves throwing a lot of different technologies into a stew and hoping that what comes out is flavorful. Unfortunately, the result is more often than not, a less than tasty meal. This book is a prime example. Although it claims to be a guide to portal development using Java, it is mainly a bare bones discussion of lots of open source technologies without tying them together. The book starts with an introduction to the Java Portlet API. This should be the heart of the book but in 35 pages we get a glance at some aspects of portals and some tables that give us a little on what but virtually nothing on how or why. Thinking that this was simply a quick introduction I wasn't too let down but then the book moves on to short chapters on Lucene, Apache James, Apache OJB, and Jakarta Slide. The book talks about security, planning, JavaScript, deployment, web services, etc. The one thing that is lacking is a feel for how this should all fit together within the Portlet API. Taking each chapter by itself, some of them are good while others cover little more than the surface of each topic. Overall, the book fails to be a guide to developing a portal using Java. It should be considered as a series of articles dealing with different aspects of portal development but without any real connection.

Excellent "soup to nuts" guide to portal development:
I have to agree with the other reviewers about how strong this book is, and how nice it is to find a book that covers JSR 168. The authors did a great job covering the whole portal development process. Here's the table of contents from my copy of the book: Part I: Open Source Portals. Chapter 1: The Java Portlet API (JSR 168). Chapter 2: Searching with Lucene. Chapter 3: Messaging with Apache James. Chapter 4: Object to Relational Mapping with Apache OJB. Chapter 5: Content Management with Jakarta's Slide. Chapter 6: Portal Security. Part II: How to Build a Portal. Chapter 7: Planning for Portal Deployment. Chapter 8: Effective Client-Side Development Using JavaScript. Chapter 9: Developing Applications and Workflow for Your Portal. Chapter 10: Portlet Integration with Web Services. Chapter 11: Performance Testing, Administering, and Monitoring Your Portal. Chapter 12: Unifying the Enterprise Application Space Through Web Start.

An utter waste of time and money:
Having read the book description I was excited by what this book might have to offer. As it turned out I was utterly disappointed with my purchase. I think the word "Professional" listed in the title of the book is totally misleading. There is nothing professional about this piece of trash. The authors appear to have done little more than scrape together as much open-source documentation as they could muster, with very little original material to hold it all together. Explanations are either poorly written or very thin on content, there is no flow between chapters, and basically no focus to the book. Just a mish-mash of technology descriptions wrapped up in a Wrox cover. Overall I would rate this as one of the worst IT books I have every bought, and I've collected plenty over the last few years. If you're after a decent portal development book you'll be disappointed/annoyed with this one.

A good place to start for Java / OS portal developers...:
I ordered this book back in November 2003 and received it late in February of 2004. Needless to say, I was happy when I received it, but I was even happier to find that it contained a wealth of material that helped to me to understand the nature of portal development and therefore make more educated decisions in my own portal projects. I have been investigating a number options including PHP / Mambo, .Net's iBuySpy, and the various Apache offerings as well as Plumtree. The investigation has been daunting because there are so many disparate perspectives on the subject when it comes to standardization and implementation. This book does not necessarily solve the "grand design" problems associated with portal development, but it certainly helps to solidify one's understanding of the JSR 168 portlet spec and the tools available develop upon that spec. Given that understanding, one can gain a more coherent perspective of not only the solution, but really the problem itself. One of the problems with the open source community is that it doesn't have the same type of backing that folks like Microsoft have. Compare Jetspeed to .Net's iBuySpy. The .Net offering has way more documentation and it is far more cohesive and direct. Of course, that's because they want you to try it out and subsequently get entrenched in their product and so on. As an open source developer one is often left to fend for one's self through experience and hearsay. The learning curve can be discouraging to say the least. This book, however, helps to alleviate that suffering greatly. Also, it doesn't put me to sleep like O'Reilly books.