Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged portlet
OOW 2009: Experiences with Oracle WebCenter 11g: Implementing SOA with a User Interface
Oct 14th
One of the sessions I am (co-)presenting at Oracle Open World 2009 is on ‘applying the concepts of SOA to and achieving the SOA objectives with User Interfaces’. What goes for SOA and typical programmatic (web)services can be applied to User Interface components to a large extent. Decoupling – cross location, cross technology, cross development team and deployment unit – and reusing based on clear interface definitions and encapsulation of implementation is also available for user interface development.
Our presentation – I am copresenting with my colleague Peter Ebell – introduced the SOA concepts and objectives and demonstrates the application of SOA to the UI, using first Portlets and then ADF Task Flows. Subsequently we introduce WebCenter – as the portlet-infrastructure for ADF and also as the real life example of the notion of reusable, independently developed user interface components. We will discuss the nature of the contract you define for such reusable UI services (parameters, events – inbound and outbound) and demonstrate the steps you have to go through to make it work. Finally we will go into ‘how to add a user interface to a SOA implementation’- or: when does a SOA artefact need a user interface.
You can find the presentation below, embedded from slideshare. You can also download the demo applications we use for this session.
Oracle WebCenter 11g – Foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications and possibly your ADF applications or Enterprise 2.0 Portal as well
Jun 24th
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.
ADF 11g: how events in one region cause other regions to refresh
Aug 28th
One of the challenges in building Portal pages is to have events from one Portlet have the desired effect on other Portlets. For example when I select a location on a Map in one Portlet, other Portlets may need to be synchronized to show the weather, the best restaurants and the driving instructions for actually going there. The JSR-168 specification does not address this issue; the upcoming JSR-286 ("Portal 2.0") specs do. Working with ADF 11g, we have some fairly new mechanisms at our disposal, such as Task Flows and Regions, that allow us to construct pages (and applications) that are somewhat reminiscent of Portlets – or at least some of the interesting sides of Portlets in terms of creating relatively simple pieces of (stand-alone) functionality that can be wired together in a larger mashup – where ideally the mashup framework can provide event propagation between the stand alone pieces. In this article, I want to investigate how for example an event occuring in region A – based on a bounded taskflow – can be passed on to region B that is based on another bounded taskflow.
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