Benefits of Integration

The benefits of developing in OracleAS Portal are numerous : the elimination of fat-client ”based applications and maintenance, the simple implementation of security, the implementation of a consistent visual interface via the use of user interface templates, and the declarative, wizard-based development approach, allowing a minimum of code to be written, just to name a few. There are, however, several considerations that must be taken into account before moving development to OracleAS Portal.

First, and foremost, a great deal of time and effort may have been spent using Oracle s other development tools (Forms, Reports , Discoverer) to build existing applications ”re-coding these applications may take resources that are impractical for many organizations to undertake. Second, Portal requires a new skill set and a new way of thinking ”it may not be feasible to retrain all of your development staff. Finally, the forms and reports components in OracleAS Portal do not have the full feature set of the Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports products, which may further make it impractical to move production applications to OracleAS Portal. While these potential limitations may influence the types of applications to be developed in OracleAS Portal for your organization, it is important to note that Oracle has made a great effort to give developers and administrators the ability to incorporate existing applications into OracleAS Portal. This chapter is devoted to exploring these options.

Having mentioned those reasons, there are significant reasons for moving existing applications into OracleAS Portal. The most significant of these are security and the exploitation of Oracle Application Server 10 g ˜s advanced security features, grouped together under the title Identity Management. It is not uncommon for developers and administrators to spend as much time and effort devising and implementing security rules for web-based applications as coding and testing the application itself. OracleAS Portal provides an integrated security structure that allows administrators to quickly and easily maintain users within OracleAS Portal. OracleAS Portal pages can be designed to show or hide different portlets (in this case, the portlets would be your Oracle Forms, Reports, and Discoverer components), depending on the security privileges for your users defined in OracleAS Portal. Further security privileges can be granted to users allowing them to modify (or, in OracleAS Portal s terminology, customize ) individual portlets for their own purposes. The mechanism for these security features is handled automatically by the OracleAS Portal engine and, in most cases, does not require any additional programming by the OracleAS Portal developer.

Another significant challenge for developers and administrators deploying web-based applications involves the effort needed to maintain a consistent look and feel across the various pages that make up the web-based application. There is nothing less professional than constructing a web site where end users are forced to visit pages that differ in font, colors, and basic page design. Because of the maturity of most web sites, we take this consistency for granted, but in most cases, a great deal of work needs to go into maintaining this consistency. OracleAS Portal provides numerous features like templates that allow developers and administrators to greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to deploy an application with consistent visual attributes.



Oracle Application Server 10g Web Development
Oracle Application Server 10g Web Development (Oracle Press)
ISBN: 0072255110
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 192

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