Turning Web applications into portlets: raising the issues

A portal is a key component of an enterprise integration strategy. It provides integration at the user interface level, whereas other integration technologies support business process, functional or data integration. To this end, portlet syndication is the next wave following the successful use of content syndication in current portals. A portlet is a full-fledge application, which is rendered within the portal framework. Over the last few years, organisations have invested in Web - enabling some of their existing systems, and they can be interested in capitalising on these Web applications by wrapping them as portlets so that they can be plugged into third-party portals. Differences between Web applications and portlets basically stem from the distinct running settings and the targeted end-users of each type of software. This paper explores the repercussion of these differences and raises the issues when "portlet-ising" an existing Web application by using wrapping technologies.