Iframe portlets - portal design pattern

Iframe portlets can be used to expose existing internal web applications and even external sites - as a matter of fact any web site as a portlet. Below are high level steps:

1. Create a basic portlet using the portlet IDE that comes with your portal, like RAD (rational application developer) for IBM portal.
   
2. In its most simple format there is just enough code to use the html iframe tag.
   
3. This tag takes url as one of the parameter which is where you specify the site url.
4. Some additional parameter that can be used are height/width of the iframe - so if you have more than one portlet on the page than use these to adjust accordingly.
5. To add more - you could use the out of the box help/edit feature of the portlet and even let the user specify the url of the site.

This approach lets you integrate existing applications very easily with your portal and is probably used a lot.

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