Chapter 13. Oracle Application Server Portal

Oracle Application Server Portal is one of the more visible components of the Oracle Application Server product. Because OracleAS Portal includes a wizard-driven development environment, it is an easy part of Oracle Application Server for people to begin using quickly. Certain parts of OracleAS Portal can even be used by end users, and this component is also easy for the Oracle sales team to demonstrate . Because OracleAS Portal provides a complete visual environment for accessing all kinds of information, end users can quickly see how the addition of OracleAS Portal can change their computing environment.

If you are unfamiliar with OracleAS Portal, you are likely to pose two immediate questions: what is OracleAS Portal and, more basically, what is a portal?

Let's answer the second question first. A portal is a way to centralize access to a variety of information sources, from a collection of web pages to user interfaces with applications. In this sense, a portal is a type of desktop, but with an important difference. You can think of a portal as a server-resident desktop. Portals are hosted on servers, so they are under the direct control of the IT organization. This architecture makes them easier to manage and control. Of course, the more flexible a portal is, the more likely that end users will be satisfied with its appearance and functionality.

OracleAS Portal is the end result of an evolutionary process across revisions and years :

• The first version of OracleAS Portal was created by an internal consulting group at Oracle. The purpose of this version was to provide an easy way to create HTML-based applications to access and interact with data in an Oracle database. This version was not a public product.

• The second version of OracleAS Portal, known as WebDB, was publicly released in 1999. WebDB had more complete application-building capabilities, but also had the beginnings of a system to organize and classify data.

• The current version of OracleAS Portal appeared with the third release of the product. At this point, the organizational powers of OracleAS Portal had matured, and the idea of portals in general was emerging in the marketplace . This version has been advanced in the Oracle Application Server 10 g release.

OracleAS Portal is a way to present information from a number of sources in one or more HTML-based pages. The place to start understanding this product is by examining the structure of a page, which we'll do in the next section. In subsequent sections we'll describe more details of portals, portlets, and the deployment of OracleAS Portal, including security issues.