Xml and More: Oracle WebCenter 11g

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Book Review: "Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook"

There are three major components in the WebCenter product stack:

WebCenter Framework
- Allows you to embed portlets, ADF Taskflows, content, and customizable components to create your WebCenter Portal application
- All Framework pieces are integrated into the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, providing access to these resources as you build your applications
WebCenter Services
- Are a set of independently deployable collaboration services
- Incorporates Web 2.0 components such as content, collaboration, discussion, announcement and communication services
WebCenter Spaces
- Is an out-of-the-box WebCenter Portal application for team collaboration and enterprise social networking
- Is built using the WebCenter Framework, WebCenter services, and Oracle Composer

As the strategic portal product of Oracle, WebCenter Framework plays in the Enterprise portal space, and WebCenter Services/Spaces plays in the Collaboration Workspace space.

What's Portal Application?

A portal can be thought of as an aggregator of content and applications or a single point of entry to a user's set of tools and applications. It is a web-based application that is customizable by the end-user both in the look and feel of the portal and in the available content and applications which the portal contains.

The key elements of portals include:

Page hierarchy
Navigation
Delegated administration and other security features
Runtime customization and personalization.

To design a successful enterprise web portal is hard, but getting easier and more practical with Oracle WebCenter which is built on top of Oracle ADF technology. As an enterprise portal, security is extremely important. Unauthorized people should never get access, and different groups may have different permissions. Customers, partners and employees should be able to use a single login to access all relevant information and applications.

The Book

To design, test, deploy, and maintain a successful web portal is nontrivial to say the least. Therefore, a cookbook like Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook is needed. In fourteen chapters, it provides over a hundred step-by-step recipes that help the reader through a wide variety of tasks ranging from portal and portlet creation to securing, supporting, managing, and administering Oracle WebCenter.

In the book, it covers many new features introduced by the 11g R1 Patch Set 3 version of the Oracle WebCenter product. It also touches upon all three components: WebCenter Framework, WebCenter Services, and WebCenter Spaces and roughly in that order. Besides important topics such as customization and security , it also discuss the analytics aspect of the product (i.e., Activity Graph).

Resource Catalog

Using resource catalog as an example, in this book, you'll learn that:

How to create a resource catalog either at design time or runtime
How to specify a catalog filter or a catalog selector
How to add a link to the resource catalog
How to add an existing resource catalog to the catalog
How to add custom components to a resource catalog
How to add custom folder to the resource catalog

At each step, you'll learn how it works and why. For example, when you add a resource catalog at runtime, an XML file will also be created, but it will be stored in the MDS (Metadata Service Repository) which is a repository used by WebCenter to store metadata.

Trade-offs

After the introduction of different approaches, the author also discusses the trade-offs of each approach. For example, with WebCenter Spaces, it allows you to build collaborative intranets without needing to develop a lot. The problem you will be having with WebCenter Spaces is that it is not as easily customizable as a regular WebCenter Portal application. Therefore, you can combine the best of both worlds. When you need a high level of customization or you need to extend the site with your custom functionality, then you should create a WebCenter Portal application. When you need a collaborative environment where customization or added functionality is not as important as the collaborative services, then go for WebCenter Spaces.

References

Thursday, November 25, 2010

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

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