In my previous article, "Reuse and the Portal Onion," you were introduced to the conceptual model of a portal onion that illustrates how a portal framework enables reuse of front-end web application assets across the user experience, portlet catalog, common services, and foundational architecture layers of the onion.
In this article, you will turn your attention to the foundation or core of the onion, as depicted in Figure 1, to study the portal development factory.
Figure 1: The Foundation or Core of the Portal Onion
The portal factory is a prescribed set of people, processes, and platforms through which front-end web application assets are created and reused across multiple user experiences. The portal factory simplifies development by following a common reference architecture and by leveraging a common portal farm that meets the performance, scalability, and availability needs of the hosted portal applications.
What Is a Software Factory?
If you are like many IT professionals, the notion of a software factory may be new to you. Simply stated, a software factory is an efficient and consistent process to build software components and assemble them into systems.
An area of software engineering related to factories is software product lines.1 A product line is a set of related systems that can be built from a set of common assets. You might set up a development factory for each product line.
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