Creating a portal and a portlets catalog

Portals are one of the most efficient ways to present information from diverse sources. This is how you can create a dashboard-style GUI that consists of a portal region and a Portlets Catalog. Portlets in the catalog can be added to the portal via a context menu. Once in the catalog, a portlet can be re-positioned or removed from the portal and sent back to the catalog. In the following screenshot, you'll see how a portlet is added using a context menu:

In the following screenshot, you'll see how a portlet is removed:

Portlets can also be re-positioned, as shown in the following screenshot:

How to do it...

The dashboard uses five main components:

• The Portlet class, which represents a portlet

• The PortletsCatalog class, which is a tree view where each node represents a portlet

• The PortalColumn class, which displays a number of portlets in a column layout

• The Portal, which contains two PortalColumn instances so that portlets are arranged into two columns...