Building an Ajax portlet for WebSphere Portal

Karl Bishop is a Senior Software Engineer on the IBM Web Enablement and Support team. He works from the wilds of North Carolina. Karl works on various internal and external portal-based applications, as well as being a strong proponent of Linux based solutions.
(An IBM developerWorks Contributing Author)

Doug Phillips is an Advisory Software Engineer for IBM's elite group of skilled professionals known as IBM's Web Enablement and Support team. He has worked in many organizations within IBM and currently designs and develops both internal and external WebSphere Portal applications using IBM middleware and Linux. Doug is WebSphere and DB2 certified.

Summary:  In our previous article, Using Ajax with WebSphere Portal, we discussed some issues and design concerns when using Ajax in a portal application. In this tutorial, we will put our newfound knowledge to use and create an Ajax portlet application. To make things interesting, we decided to build a portlet that makes heavy use of Ajax and DHTML. This provides you a glimpse into what's possible with this technology, and to also give you a useful tool to browse your databases. While most of the application is already written, it is up to you to fill in the blanks to get things running.