424CHAPTER 11

The enhanced Ajax web portal

More and more companies have been adopting a portal-based intranet. Portals give users an easy gateway for obtaining large quantities of information on one page. This eliminates the need for the user to go to multiple locations to get the information they need. Online portals such as Yahoo! allow us to obtain news, weather, sports scores, mail, games, and so much more on just one page. Another portal is Amazon’s A9.com search portal, which lets us do searches on multiple areas without going to separate pages. We can search for web pages, books, images, and much more on one page. A9.com utilizes Ajax to display the information on the screen. This allows for a great user experience since the user does not have to sit and wait for page re-rendering when new search results are displayed.

In this chapter, we are incorporating Ajax into a portal to improve the user’s experience: specifically, how he logs into the system and how the system remembers his details. The portal project will allow the user to customize the layout of the portal with a minimum amount of effort. The user will not even realize that his actions are sending information back to the server to remember the exact location of the objects on the page. This means that his personal settings are the same every time he logs into the system. We first take a low-level approach to building the portal. We implement a basic portal framework in a less-structured manner to shed light on the concept behind the portal. We then look at the portal in a more advanced light using an object-oriented approach. Before we implement the portal, let’s examine some current portals and see how adding Ajax can improve the user’s experience.

11.1 The evolving portal

Over time, portals have evolved from simple sites that let us check our mail and do a search to elaborate setups that allow us to obtain a large amount of information in little time and with little effort. By comparison, in the past we had to check one site for news, another for weather, another for comics, another for a search, and so on. Either we had tons of bookmarks for the sites that we checked daily, or we just memorized our routine of what addresses to type into the browser.

11.1.1The classic portal

We are all accustomed to classic portals—we’ve been using them for years—and a lot of company intranets are using them to improve company performance by having everything in one place. The classic portal is one that allows a user to log into the system and have the content personalized to her tastes. For example, a

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company portal can have one setup for a salesperson and another setup for a computer programmer. Both of these employees may need to have a window to the company calendar, but they both may not need to see the sales figures or the bug report for the applications. By limiting what they can see, we increase company security and improve the employees’ performance since they do not have to search for information all over the company intranet.

Another example of a classic portal is Yahoo!. When we log into Yahoo!, we can check mail, change the weather to fit our current location, change the look, and so much more. As you can see in figure 11.1, Yahoo!’s portal is customized to the needs of the user.

Yahoo! accomplishes this by sending us to maintenance screens to alter the information. One example of the maintenance page allows us to select the city that we live in so that the weather forecast is for our area. In figure 11.1, you can

Figure 11.1 Yahoo!’s portal shows customized information.

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see that the weather is customized to Laurel, Maryland. While it is great that we can customize the information we want to see, we can enhance the user experience even more by incorporating Ajax into the portal in the same way that Amazon did with the A9.com portal.

11.1.2The rich user interface portal

With an Ajax portal, the rich user interface is more dynamic than a classic portal while positively impacting the user’s experience. We can add new content and change the way the content is displayed in a seamless manner. A great example of this seamless interaction is in Amazon’s A9.com search portal. Let’s look at how that works. In figure 11.2, a search has been performed for Eric Pascarello with only the Web checkbox selected.

Now let’s narrow the search results. We know that we are looking for a book that Pascarello has written, so we click the Books checkbox. The Book Results pane is inserted into the right-hand side of the page. The search results for Eric Pascarello’s books are displayed without posting the entire page back to the server to obtain them, as shown in figure 11.3.

Another example of using Ajax to enhance the portal experience is in the configuration of the portal. Ajax allows the user interface to become part of the

Figure 11.2 A9.com’s portal with the web results for Eric Pascarello