Regarding custom portal

Hey guys,

I need to build a custom portal for my vcloud director to showcase it to one of the clients and i'm not from development background. I have a friend with me who knows how to code and work with java. Is that enough to leverage the API's to build a custom portal? Is there a reference or has someone done and had a clue? Please help me with this as its really important for me. I want to just include all the things vCD can do in the UI to the custom portal. Like creating a new vAPP and so on. Please help.