I have had a sweet spot for Oracle WebCenter for quite some time now. As early as 2007 I already did a presentation at ODTUG on WebCenter (10g). One of my main conclusion at the time was that while the product showed a lot of potential, it was certainly not ready for prime time. After that presentation, a guy came up to me, thanked me for the presentation then told me he was a product manager for WebCenter – and agreed with most of the things I had said. That was my first encounter with Peter Moskovits. Today, two years later, the situation has changed quite dramatically. WebCenter has evolved, as had ADF which is the foundation for WebCenter, and WC is now one of the cornerstones for Oracle Fusion Applications. WebCenter 11g is like the swan that started out as the ugly duckling. Well worth a look.

 

I was in a presentation today by Peter Moskovits and Christina Kolotouros, titled: A Marriage Made in Heaven – Enterprise 2.0 and ADF. They touted it as Part 2 of Steve Miranda’s talk on how Fusion Applications were built (see: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/5645/oracle-fusion-applications-it-is-for-real-and-impressive-too ). In this presentation, they explained the architecture of WebCenter, demonstrated the use of some of the essential facilities and clarified how the product can be incorporated in your own ADF development efforts.

 

WebCenter implements the (runtime) customization & personalization requirements, allows consumption of 3rd party external portlets (that also bridge technologies), provides many Web 2.0/E2.0 Services (Blog, Wiki, Content Integration, Tagging, Linking, Email/VOIP/IM integration, …) and Community Workspaces; Search and Recent Activities.

 

WebCenter lives on top of ADF which in turn adds productivity to ‘plain’ JSF – through rich components, declarative and visual development and especially the data controls and complex databindings they provide to tie business services based on various technologies to the rich components. It adds functionality in a number of steps to the ADF foundation.

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