There exist many portal servers that support the construction of portals that is portals that allow the user to have one or more personal pages composed of a number of personalizable services. The main drawback of current portal servers is their lack of generality and adaptability. This paper presents the design of MyPersonalizer a J2EE-based framework for engineering My portals. The framework is structured according to the Model-View-Controller and Layers architectural patterns providing generic adaptable model and controller layers that implement the typical use cases of a My portal. MyPersonalizer allows for a good separation of roles in the development team: graphical designers (without programming skills) develop the portal view by writing JSP pages while software engineers implement service plugins and specify framework configuration.

Development of distributed applications is a difficult task. Object Requests Brokers (ORBs) facilitate the development of large and complex distributed applications. However, the programmer still has to deal with a complex framework, which increases the learning curve. In this paper, we present a middleware that tries to facilitate the transition from the design to the implementation. The middleware is made up of a C++ framework and an Agent Definition Language (ADL). The framework is implemented on top of a CORBA ORB and provides the programmer with high-level abstractions, such as "agent" and "FUN" (a special class of agent that delegate part of its functionality into a number of cooperating agents). ADL is a template-like language, which hides the underlying C++ framework from the programmer (including the CORBA ORB). The paper makes special emphasis in describing such a language.

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