Introducing BEA WebLogic Portal

The primary purpose of J2EE is to provide a standards-based, flexible, and portable technology framework for developing and deploying Web-enabled enterprise applications. Typically, there is a one-to-one relationship between a Web interface and its associated J2EE application, which implies that as an organization increases the Web presence of its applications, the number of interfaces to those applications also increases in a linear fashion. Taking into account the multiple knowledge- and content-based Web sites an organization might also have, the proliferation of a large number of Web interfaces not only creates the perception of disparate technical ecosystems, but also hinders the collaboration of information and knowledge.

Today's knowledge workers are quite savvy people, and to perform their work efficiently , require a primary Web interface for all significant applications, information streams, and collaboration initiatives within the organization, for example:

• Access to all corporate directories, events, and relevant information feeds (news).

• A personalized taxonomy of organizational information and data, which provides an optimal decision-making foundation.

• A central launch pad for all relevant Web-enabled applications.

• A central collaboration interface for email, tasks , schedules, and group /team communication (such as bulletin boards ).

• Intelligent document/content/knowledge search capabilities.

In essence, what today's knowledge workers require is a Web-enabled desktop (interface) similar to the Windows desktop. J2EE alone does not provide this requirement for integrating different Web interfaces and rendering multiple streams of dynamic content seamlessly through a single well-designed Web interface. The only technology solution capable of providing a mechanism for designing and building these more complex Web-based interfaces is using a Portal framework to implement a portal . There are many definitions of a portal; however, the Gartner Group, a leading research firm (http://www.gartner.com), describes it the best in the context of an organization: "A portal provides access to and interaction with relevant information, applications and business processes, by select targeted audiences, in a highly personalized manner." The key development component of a portal solution is the portlet, which is a reusable component that combines Web-based content, application functionality, and access to resources within the context of a portal page.

A portal allows an organization to provide centralized but personalized content to its users, whether they are employees using an intranet portal or external business partners . For example, an organization could create a portal to give employees access to company news, human resource information, email, and other intranet resources. These resources could very well reside on many different internal and external systems, but the employee is presented with a consistent, customizable interface to these systems through the portal. The organization could also use the portal to give business partners inventory and order-management capabilities, again interfacing with internal systems to supply the information.

The BEA WebLogic Portal product provides organizations with a large set of tools to create enterprise-class portals for a wide variety of end users.

A High-Level Architecture of WebLogic Portal

WebLogic Portal consists of libraries and J2EE applications built on top of the WebLogic server. There are four main systems within WebLogic Portal:

• Personalization services ” This system provides a wide range of services, including a page transition management system known as W ebflow , a rules engine, entitlements , delegated administration, and a unified user profile.

• Portal services ” This system includes portlet management and portlet page layout and skins.

• Commerce services ” This system provides e-commerce capabilities, including an extensible product catalog, order management, payment management, taxation and credit card processing, discounts , campaigns , and advertisement management.

• EBusiness Control Center (EBCC) ” This system assists in developing WebLogic Portal applications.

These subsystems of WebLogic Portal are described in more depth in the following sections.

Personalization Services

The personalization services in WebLogic Portal provide a foundation on which to build enterprise portals. These are the main services:

• Webflow is a page transition management system that greatly simplifies developing and managing Web-based systems by decoupling page-to-page transition logic from HTML or JSP pages and externalizes it in XML files. Webflow uses input processors , which are specialized Java classes that can carry out complex tasks within the Webflow system. For example, an input processor can be used to do form verification on a page instead of putting that logic into a JSP. Webflow also contains "pipelines" that support transactional business logic. The pipelines can be used across multiple Web applications to implement the same business logic.

• A unified user profile (UUP) can leverage data from one or more external sources, such as LDAP or legacy databases, and present that information in a common format.

• Delegated administration allows different administrators to manage individual portals. Administrative privileges can be delegated to another user if a particular administrator has the ability to do so.

• A rules engine is used by other services to dynamically evaluate a complex rule or set of rules. A rule could be used to grant access to a particular portlet, for example. The rule might state that a user must be in a particular role and the access date must fall within the first week of a month. If these two conditions are met, the user is allowed to see the portlet; otherwise , he is not. The rules engine takes various pieces of information and returns a result to the requester.

• An entitlements service uses the rules engine to determine if, for example, a particular user should be allowed to have access to a particular page.

• An event engine can fire events to listeners when, for example, a user logs in.

• Personalization services, such as maintaining user display preferences, user demographics , and so on, are available.

Portal Services

Portal services help with displaying and managing portlets. Within WebLogic Portal, portlets are traditionally small sections of information within a Web page. Each portlet can display content that may or may not have anything to do with other portlets on the page. Some portlets can be minimized so that only their title bar is displayed, or maximized so that they take up the entire Web page. As part of the portal, users can customize portlets' layout on a particular page or the color or font they are displayed with. Alternatively, a portal page can be set to look the same for all users of a group and can be customized only by an administrator.

Commerce Services

WebLogic Portal includes a complete e-commerce system, which includes the following:

• An extensible catalog ” The catalog is based on industry standards and enables customers to use it out-of-the-box, extend it with additional attributes, or replace it completely with a system of the customer's choice.

• A shopping cart ” This component can store and manage the shopping cart content of logged-in users and anonymous users.

• An order-management system ” Customers use this system to track and manage orders. The order-management system enables a customer to, for example, mark an order as shipped or partially shipped or cancel an order.

• Generalized e-commerce capabilities ” These capabilities include sales tax calculation and credit card processing.

• Campaigns and interaction management ” A campaign allows a WebLogic Portal user to display advertising campaigns to a site visitor. For example, if a user placed an item in her shopping cart, an event could be sent to the campaign service. The campaign service would then determine that the WebLogic Portal user wanted to display an advertisement for a related product to the Web site user. This advertisement would then be displayed to the user to encourage her to purchase additional merchandise.

The EBusiness Control Center (EBCC)

The EBCC is a developer tool that assists in designing and maintaining a WebLogic Portal site. Developers use the EBCC to develop Web flows using the personalization Web flow engine, to create and manage portals and portlets, to manage campaigns, and to perform many other tasks.