Portal Technologies

Introduction

Empowering scientific communities with tools that enable them to make use of  European Grid Infrastructure services is important for the successful engagement of EGI with with new users. Portals play an important role here.

Portals can eliminate barriers of e-Infrastructure access, portals can seamlessly integrate the grid and the web. Because of their strong relation to users, portals are typically geared to specific use cases. Several NGIs, user communities and projects of EGI offer portals or reusable "portal builder technologies" for end users and for portal developers. With such a diversity it becomes difficult to make a decision on which technology to use. Which portal or portal builder technology should I use? During the last EGI Technical Forum the User and Community Support Team of EGI.eu organized a topical workshop on portal technologies and tried to answer that question.

An important outcome of the workshop was an agreement to create a "portal technology comparison table" for EGI. The table aims to provide an analysis of existing and reusable portals, portal developer frameworks, portlets and components to help scientific communities and their supporting NGIs identify solutions that best meet their needs and should be considered when building and using portals.