pict features

The pict project aims at building a jsr168 compliant portal engine able to elegantly address a wide range of application domains.

pict consistently solves navigation and ergonomic issues related to the implementation of portals.

pict is a jsr168 compliant portal engine

• pict is a complete implementation of jsr168. Based on a simple conceptual model, it allows organizing jsr168 compliant portlets in a hierarchical page model and handles their execution. The jsr168 specification standardizes the development of J2EE portlets and portals.

• Access rights are managed at every level and allow for fine-grained control over what page or portlet a user can access. The standard JAAS API is used for authentication.

• Portlet deployment is automatic and do not requires specific deployment descriptors. Portlet-based applications are hot deployable.

pict can be used in a wide range of situations

• pict uses a rules engine to manage users access rights and navigation. Rules are expressed in a high-level scripting language and interact with the portal through an easy to use API. Hence, you can quickly address any situation or special case without modifying the portal engine itself. Rules do not need to be compiled and are hot deployable.

• pict lets portal builders and administrators add metadata to the pages and portlets they build graphically. At run-time, rules can make use of this metadata to handles access rights and navigation.

pict complies with web standards

• The portal engine makes use of semantically correct and easy to manage URLs. These URLs are simple and easy to read. They reflect the structure of the portal. In addition pict provides you with an abstract URL model that offers a functional view of the various deployed portlets and lets you organize them consistently.

• pict produces W3C compliant XHTML code. As a notable benefit, this make the portal easier to access from a wide range of devices (mobile phones, PDAs, Braille terminals etc.)

• The style engine of pict is based on CSS, Javascript and DOM. Creating a new display style is easy and do not require the modification of the portal engine templates. pict supports the most complex visual presentations and is ready for AJAX.

• pict allows portlets to automatically import their CSS as well as other non-HTML elements like RSS feeds.

pict is a free software leveraging recognized technologies

• Spring, the lightweight, dependency injection based container, organizes all the components of pict. Thus, pict is built on a very modular design with pluggable components. It can be modified or extended very easily.

• Pluto, the popular portlet container, brings jsr168 compliance to pict. Pluto is the reference implementation of the jsr168 specification and is used in other portals (e.g. JetSpeed).

• Drools, the rules engine, manages access rights, navigation and communication between portlets. Its flexibility allows pict to be used in a wide range of situations.

• Groovy is the scripting language used to express rules in the Drools engine. It is a high level interpreted language.