1.2 WebSphere Portal Enable

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WebSphere Portal V4.1 Enable Edition is available on the z/OS and OS/390 platforms, and runs on WebSphere Application Server V4.1.4 for z/OS. The IBM WebSphere Portal Enable offering lets you quickly build highly scalable portals that simplify and speed up access to personalized information and applications. WebSphere Portal Enable provides common services including connectivity and integration that allows access to enterprise data, and other external applications.

1.2.1 WebSphere Portal for z/OS and OS/390 packages

Along with WebSphere Portal server, you get Personalization Server, WebSphere Portal Content Publishing (WPCP), WebSphere Transcoding Publisher (WTP), User Management facility, security features, Click-to-Action (C2A), development tools and other features useful for constructing a portal site.

1.2.2 WebSphere Personalization Server

The WebSphere Personalization Server provides technologies for targeting Web content to meet user needs and preferences via rules-based personalization, where the business manager defines a set of business rules that determines whether the Web content is to be displayed for a particular user or a group of users.

1.2.3 WebSphere Portal Content Publishing

WebSphere Portal Content Publishing (WPCP) provides a browser-based interface that enables non-technical users to create, contribute, and manage content on portals and Web sites in a simple and controlled manner. Features like template management, workflow management, version control, and access control allow users to publish static or dynamic content quickly and efficiently. This provides portal end users with access to up-to-date information when they need it.

There are two parts to WPCP - the Publisher runtime and the Publisher Authortime. The WPCP Publisher runtime gets installed on the z/OS and OS/390 platforms, and the Authortime is provided for installation on a distributed platform. WPCP Authoring server uses a workflow that could be Lotus® Workflow™ V3.4 that requires Lotus Domino® components, or the stand-alone Lite Workflow that is provided with WPCP.

1.2.4 WebSphere Transcoding Publisher

This WebSphere Transcoding Publisher (WTP) component is installed along with WebSphere Portal Server. Portal users or administrators do not use or configure WTP directly, but the Portal Server uses it behind the scenes for the Web clipping feature and when the displayed portal pages need to be rendered for wireless devices using WML or cHTML.

1.2.5 WebSphere Studio Application Developer and the Portal Toolkit

WebSphere Portal comes with a tool for professional developers. It is called WebSphere Studio Application Developer (simply stated as Application Developer) and runs on the Windows platform as part of the portal development environment. It can be used for creating, testing, debugging, and deploying portlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), servlets, EJBs and other assets related to portals and J2EE Web applications. The Portal Toolkit is provided as a plug-in to be installed within Application Developer to provide wizards and perspectives to assist with portlet development.

1.2.6 Summary

In terms of architecture and installation, WebSphere Portal Server, Personalization Server, WebSphere Transcoding Publisher, and the Publisher runtime for WebSphere Portal Content Publishing are installed on the z/OS and OS/390 platforms. This installation is covered in Chapter 2, "Portal installation" on page 19.

WPCP Authortime, and Application Developer typically gets installed on a Windows system or another supported distributed system and is covered in Chapter 3, "Development environment installation" on page 93.

The software components that make up WebSphere Portal are typically installed on hardware in production environments with two basic architectures - two-tier or three-tier. The hardware can be split up further creating n-tiers, but logically they map to two or three tier architectures using the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture as a reference. For information on J2EE and its architectures, refer to:

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html

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