A Generic Architecture for User-Centric Portlet Integration

Numerous attempts have been made towards achieving flexible integration of external applications into a coherent enterprise architecture. The topic of "networked enterprises" describes flexible organisations characterised by distributed teams of partner companies, humans, computer applications, autonomous robots, and devices collaborating with each other in order to achieve higher productivity and to cooperate in joint projects or produce joint products that would have been impossible to develop without the contributions of multiple collaborators. In this context, flexible and secure integration of external services that can be adjusted during runtime becomes of crucial importance in order to quickly respond to changing market needs. In this paper, an architecture for dynamic application integration in web-based portal systems is presented which focuses on the user as the centre of consideration. Following its presentation, the proposed architecture is validated as part of a large-scale prototype.