Chapter 15. Portals
IN THIS CHAPTER
Now that you've learned how to build and use Web Services, you'll be building an application that ties together a variety of Web Services into a single portal application built using ASP.NET. This application will be able to do the following:
Allow new users to register automatically
Retrieve the weather for a particular ZIP code
Retrieve information about a user's stocks
Retrieve news headlines from a variety of news sources
Allow the user profile to be edited to change the information being displayed in the portal page
The profile information will be stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2000, but you can use any database you want. This application uses a total of four Web Services that were available at the time of writing through the XMethods site (xmethods.net). By using publicly available services, you eliminate the need to “reinvent the wheel” for your portal. You can focus instead on the user interface and how the Web Services interact with the user's portal desktop. When the portal is running, it looks something like Figure 15.1.
Figure 15.1. User interface for the portal application.
After the user logs into the portal, the page shown in Figure 15.2 will appear.
Figure 15.2. The user's home page for the portal application.
The main portal page includes sections for the local weather, the stocks the user wishes to track, and the current headlines. At the top of the page, the user can choose to log out of the system or edit his/her profile, which allows the ZIP code and/or the stocks to be changed. You could also add an additional page to allow passwords to be changed, but this is left for you to complete.
In the process of building this page, you'll also work with the following features of .NET:
Forms Authentication security
File I/O
Web user controls
Validation controls
These technology components, as well as the others you've already learned, will help you build a better application for the potential users of the system.