A service-portlet based visual paradigm for personalized convergence of information resources

It gains more and more attentions on how to enable users to dynamically construct and reconstruct Web applications of information convergence in run time to resolving urgent and unplanned business requirements. Visual programming environment, information resources virtualization and management, and visual representation of user-defined applications are important and challenging issues in dynamically constructing these applications. To address these needs, a service-portlet based visual paradigm is proposed to support dynamically constructing Web application of information resources convergence. Information resources are represented by portlets in a portal container to hide programming details of accessing and communicating with information resources. Users can select and set collaborations patterns between these information portlets to construct applications of information convergence. In phrase of execution, these applications are translated into convergent scripts which are transparent for users and executed by a script engine and convergent results generated by the engine are represented again by a portlet before users. A proof-of-concept prototype is developed and tested to demonstrate the utility of the proposed paradigm.