A short and very brief description of Bowstreet Portlet Factory...
Bowstreet is a company that was acquired by IBM in december 2005. The correct name now is WebSphere Portlet Factory. Here are the release notes.
The tool is used to rapidly creating portlets accessing back-end data like Domino, SAP, Siebel and other enterprise information systems for the WebSphere Portal environment.
There are more than 100 builders included in WebSphere Portlet Factory. A builder is a customizable, reusable component which generates XML, Java and JSP for specific portlet functionality.
A developer can create new portlets by first creating a new model or application container and then add builders to the model. Thus, a model is a sequence of builders. It is possible to create your own builders by writing java classes.
A portlet is a larger catalog structure in the file system which is compressed into a WAR-file and then placed into the WebSphere Portal Server.
A couple of examples of what you can do with WebSphere Portlet Factory is web services portlets, portlets with AJAX-functionality and Domino specific portlets.
WebSphere Portlet Factory can be used integrated with the Eclipse platform or with Rational Application Developer (RAD).
Alternatives to WebSphere Portlet Factory is RAD or Workplace Designer. RAD is much more advanced, it provides more functionality but hence it is probably more difficult to use. Workplace Designer has not got as much functionality as RAD. What you need depends on what you want to do. According to IBM there will probably be a merge of two or more of these tools.
RAD is included with WebSphere Portal Server with 1 license per CPU.
Technorati tags:
Bowstreet Portlet Factory, WebSphere Portlet Factory, builder, portlet, RAD