Abstract
"The information overload many computer users have to face has lead
to the stardom of Internet portals. Despite their immense popularity,
portals are hard to define and there is a lack of general approaches
for their implementation. The goal of this work has been to close this
gap by developing a framework for arbitrary portals.
The first step has been to deduce a possible definition of a portal as
a system which grants a user an easy, secure, and personalized access
to the information he or she requires. With this broader understanding
of the subject area, a general abstraction has been evolved. Following
the principle of ``keep it small and simple'' lead to a modularized
design which showed that the central part of a portal can be seen as
a lean server.
The next logical step was the development of a framework for portals
based on the previous abstraction to demonstrate how common problems
of portals can be solved in an elegant way."
|