Book Review: Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g

This article reviews a book named Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g authored by Plinio Arbizu and Ashok Aggarwal with the help of Amit Gupta and Sukanta K. Hazra.

Web 2.0 takes advantage the web platform to build applications that offer communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, social networking while Enterprise 2.0 promotes the productivity of organizations by using the new technology platform offered by Web 2.0. The scope of Enterprise 2.0 is not restricted to the organization itself, but also includes its partners and customers.

How we can implement a solution that supports the guidelines suggested by Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0? The Oracle answer is called Oracle WebCenter Suite.

In this book, it teaches you how to create custom WebCenter applications using Oracle WebCenter Suite with its hands-on practical tutorial.

What's Oracle WebCenter

In a nutshell, Oracle WebCenter provides design time and runtime tools for building enterprise portals, transactional websites, and social networking sites. Different WebCenter terms mean different products and services it provide. See below for clarification:

WebCenter Services – A set of pre-built business components (Blogs, Wikis, Discussions, Search, etc) that developers can utilize to build applications. These are essentially out of the box portlets.
WebCenter Spaces – The homegrown out of the box Oracle portal product.
WebCenter Framework – A set of ADF components and APIs that let developers tap into the Oracle product stack.
WebCenter Suite 11g - Oracle owns 3 portal products: WCI (Plumtree->BEA acquisition), BEA Portal (BEA acquisition), and WebCenter (Oracle Organic product). WebCenter Suite is the blanket license you can buy to acquire all three of these portal products.
WebCenter 11g - The term used for collectively referring to Oracle WebCenter Spaces, WebCenter Services, and WebCenter Framework.

What's in the Book

Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of Web 2.0 features and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. It is the platform that provides the integration of the following services:

• Wiki and Blog Services
• Content Management Service
• Discussion Forums Service
• Search Service
• Tags and Links Services

To simplify its configuration and deployment, Oracle has provided pre-bluilt solutions such as existing WebCenter task flows, an out-of-box Portal application, and many other building blocks which requires little development efforts. However, it still requires you some knowledge of how to assemly different components together and in which order. To fill in that gap, this cookbook comes in handy. It provides you detailed step-by-step instructions, guidance, tips and best practices.

For example, it

• Provides you the tip on increasing the number of processes to be used by Database
• Describes each building blocks and instructs you to build them from bottom up
• Guides you to run Repository Creation Utility (RCU) and install the WebLogic Server before you install WebCenter
• Helps you create simple WebCenter applications to demonstrate the tools, development methodology, and deployment of custom WebCenter applications
• Helps you create a HelloWorld web service, which is used by a HelloWorld portlet producer; the portlet producer is then consumed by a HelloWorld WebCenter application
• Helps you develop page templates and add data-access features to your WebCenter applications
• Demonstrates simple ways to incorporate different collaboration tools or services into your custom WebCenter applications
• Shows you how to configure ADF Security and set the ADF policy on the pages created
• Makes clear how to configure, personalize and create content and combine it with external information using Oracle WebCenter Spaces
• Touches upon Oracle Composer and Oracle Metadata Service

Read More

With the aid of this book, you can acquire the experience of setting up Oracle WebCenter design-time and runtime environments, developing Custom WebCenter applications with JDeveloper IDE using ADF and JSF, working on an out-of-box Portal Application named WebCenter Spaces, creating site contents using WebCenter Spaces, etc. However, this is just a beginning.

You can follow up on resources listed in the references section. For example, as a WebCenter Developer, you would like to read its Developer's Guide; to polish your ADF skills, you would like follow up on Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide.

Finally, you can also deep dive into Fusion Order Demo for WebCenter, which demonstrates common use cases in Fusion Middleware applications, including the integration between different components of the Fusion technology stack (ADF, BPEL, and WebCenter).

References

1. Developing Applications on Oracle® WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 (10.3)
2. Oracle® Fusion Middleware Tutorial for Oracle WebCenter Developers 11g Release 1 (11.1.1)
3. Oracle JDeveloper and ADF Documentation (11.1.1.3.0)
4. Oracle WebCenter Developer's Guide
5. Oracle Fusion Order Demo Application for WebCenter
6. Time For Enterprise 2.0 To Get Enterprisey by Sandy Kemsley
7. Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g
8. Oracle® Fusion Middleware Repository Creation Utility User's Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.1)