The Portal Framework was developed by Kai Jauslin as a practical part of his master thesis. The concept was very similar to Apache Cocoon.

• Chapter 2 is the synthesis of the contemporary (2002) information sources on portals. If there is a reference on some reference to some image missing the article it is taken from is definitely listed.
• Chapter 3 is an overview of contemporary (2002) personalization techniques. Privacy, which I find extremely important today, was not important in for me when I wrote my thesis. Probably because I thought that people become mean and invidious only when they do not have enough money to live. That was one of the biggest critiques I have received during the presentation.
• Chapter 4 of my thesis is a combination of the translation of the parts of Kai's thesis that I found important to explain the applications I have developed. It comprises the overview of similar, more or less complex solutions available at that moment.
• Chapter 5 contains the description of the technologies I have used to develop the practical part of my thesis (JSP tag libraries and the applications that use them). Apache POI Project did not exist (or was in it's early phases) and I am not really sure if it would have helped. I have not developed new clustering technique, but integrated the one offered by the Microsoft Analysis Services.

Here you can download the thesis, which was a kind of utopian at the time but is heavily used today by social platforms. The implementations are of course much more sophisticated, but still lack privacy. I can send you the tag libraries if you want to see the code.