Oracle WebCenter Suite 10gR3 Technical White Paper · users enhancing information worker productivity and the value of existing IT investments. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Oracle WebCenter Suite 10gR3 Technical White Paper An Oracle White Paper March 2009

Oracle WebCenter Suite10gR3 Technical White Paper Page 2

Oracle WebCenter Suite 10gR3 Technical White Paper

Introduction ................................ ................................ ........................... 4 What is Oracle WebCenter Suite? ................................ ........................... 4

WebCenter Framework ...................................................................... 5 WebCenter Services ................................ ................................ ........... 8 WebCenter Interaction ....................................................................... 9 Oracle WebLogic Portal ..................................................................... 9

Building a WebCenter Application ....................................................... 10 Making Applications Customizable .................................................. 10 Building Portlets............................................................................... 11 Integrating Portlets........................................................................... 12 Business User Mashup Tools............................................................ 13 Portlet Interaction with ADF Faces Components ............................ 14 Styling a WebCenter Application ...................................................... 15 Integrating Content Using the Java Content Repository Standard (JCR) ................................................................................................ 16 Securing the WebCenter Application................................................ 18 Deploying the WebCenter Application ............................................. 23

Accelerating Your Application with WebCenter Web 2.0 Services........ 25 Secure Enterprise Search (SES) ........................................................ 25 Oracle Communication and Mobility Server (OCMS) ...................... 26 Oracle Content Server ...................................................................... 26 Discussions ...................................................................................... 27 Wiki ................................ ................................ ................................ . 29 Blog ................................ ................................ ................................ . 30 WebCenter Ensemble ...................................................................... 31 Improving Relevancy with WebCenter Analytics .............................. 33

Seamlessly Bridge Diverse Platforms with WebCenter Interaction ....... 35 WebCenter Interaction ..................................................................... 35 WebCenter Collaboration................................ ................................ . 36 WebCenter Publisher ....................................................................... 37 WebCenter Sharepoint Console ....................................................... 38 WebCenter .NET Application Accelerator ....................................... 38

Create Enterprise Portals Using Oracle WebLogic Portal ..................... 40 Interaction Management .................................................................. 41 Search, Content Integration and Publishing...................................... 41 Security ............................................................................................ 42


Conclusion ........................................................................................... 44


Oracle WebCenter Suite 10g R3 Technical White Paper

INTRODUCTION

Oracle WebCenter Suite is the industry's most integrated, comprehensive, and standards-compliant user interaction product suite providing Web integration and interface services for deploying a broad range of solutions. These include portals and composite applications with unique capabilities for Enterprise 2.0 collaborative and social applications that seamlessly combine search, publishing and knowledge management. As part of a SOA environment, Oracle WebCenter Suite provides valuable new capabilities for connecting enterprise systems more effectively with users enhancing information worker productivity and the value of existing IT investments.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is changing the way applications are architected and delivered. Monolithic applications are being transformed into re-usable services that can be orchestrated, managed, and consumed by composite applications. The focus and value-add of SOA within an enterprise centers on agility: the ability to make organizations more nimble so they can better react to ever-changing market conditions. While agility is a key driver, it is not the only one. Equally, if not more important, is making every information worker more productive. So, not only do we have to think about how to build applications more effectively (with SOA), we also need build more effective applications. This is the primary objective of the Oracle WebCenter: to provide the tools to deliver the next generation online work environment that dramatically improves efficiency and productivity by adapting to the way people work.

This white paper introduces Oracle WebCenter Suite, a new option in Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product line. Oracle WebCenter Sutie is focused on providing tools and services for creating highly productive user work environments that take advantage of SOA to enable business users to bring complete context to their daily work tasks.

WHAT IS ORACLE WEBCENTER SUITE?

Oracle WebCenter combines the standards-based, declarative development of Java Server Faces (JSF), the flexibility and power of portals, and a set of integrated Web 2.0 services to boost end-user productivity. Together, these services provide a unique ability to build applications that eliminate context shifts and maximize productivity. For example, using Oracle WebCenter capabilities, you can build


applications that allow the user to interact directly with instant messengers, voice over IP, and other collaborative services directly within the application. The user doesn't merely pass through the application to get to these services; they are integrated into the very fabric of the application.

Figure 1 – The WebCenter Architecture

WebCenter Framework

The WebCenter Framework allows you to embed portlets, content, and customizable components in your application. Content is accessed via JSR170-based content integration services, which make it possible to expose data and applications residing in Oracle Content Database Suite, OracleAS Portal, third-party content management systems like MS Sharepoint, IBM Domnio.DOC or Documentum, and even the file system. All Framework pieces are integrated into JDeveloper, providing you unified access to these resources as you build your applications. Furthermore, the powerful Search framework allows you to seamlessly include enterprise-wide search capabilities into your application.

WebCenter Extension for JDeveloper

Oracle JDeveloper is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building service-oriented applications using the latest industry standards for Java, XML, Web services, and SQL. Oracle JDeveloper supports the complete software development life cycle, with integrated features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying applications. The WebCenter Framework capabilities and resources are seamlessly integrated and exposed in JDeveloper to maximize the productivity of enterprise application developers.


Figure 2 - Drag and Drop WebCenter Components in the Component Palette

All the development functionality you need for building WebCenter-enabled applications is available in the JDeveloper environment. JDeveloper's visual and declarative approach and ADF work together to simplify application development and reduce mundane coding tasks. For example, code for many standard user interface widgets, such as buttons, lists of values, and navigation bars, is prepackaged for you.

WebCenter components are readily accessible from a catalog of resources available on the Components and Data Control palettes. Simply drag the resource you require and drop it on a JSF page, where it will be surfaced as a view component that is automatically bound to the ADF model.

WebCenter provides several wizards to help you with essential development tasks such as building a portlet, consuming an existing portlet, creating a data control to a content repository, and securing your application (to mention only a few). By significantly reducing the amount of coding you need to do, WebCenter dramatically increases your productivity as a developer.

For more information on JDeveloper development environment, visit the JDeveloper home page on OTN.

Application Templates

In JDeveloper, the easiest way to ensure that you properly define an application and its projects with the appropriate technology scope is to apply an application template. An application template automatically partitions the application into projects that reflect a logical separation of the overall work. The Oracle WebCenter provides a template optimally configured for building WebCenter applications.

The WebCenter Application template consists of a project for the data model (Model); a project for creating portlets (Portlets); and a project for consuming portlets, components, and data controls (ViewController). For simplicity, the


WebCenter Application template folds these three projects into one application, but you are welcome to arrange your applications and projects in the way that best suits your requirements.

WebCenter Anywhere

The need for productivity and efficiency extends beyond the office. In today’s fast-paced world with ever more powerful mobile devices, it has become critical to work effectively wherever you are. WebCenter leverages Oracle’s robust wireless platform to bring the benefits of a unified work environment to all types of mobile technologies, including connected devices such as PDAs and Smart phones, Mobile Voice, Mobile Messaging and even Telnet-based devices for industrial users. In addition, users might want to access their WebCenter application directly from their Windows Desktop and Office tools.

WebCenter Anywhere is focused on bringing the productivity and efficiency of context-rich WebCenter applications to users wherever they happen to be.

ADF Mobile

As WebCenter developers begin to reap the benefits of increased productivity from JSF technology, Oracle seeks to bring the same benefits to mobile application development with ADF Mobile.

Starting with Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3.2.0), ADF Mobile and JDeveloper leverage the JSF standard to facilitate the rapid development of applications such as: Mobile browser applications for PDAs (Microsoft PocketPC, Palm Treo, and so on)

Developing mobile browser applications for PDAs with ADF Mobile leverages the same methodologies involved in developing JSF applications for the desktop, but with a few mobile-specific extensions. With support for over 60 of the standard ADF Faces components, developers can build applications with the rich component set, each rendered appropriately for small-screen mobile devices. In this way, WebCenter developers can reuse their desktop browser application’s Model and Controller layers and simply assemble a new View layer for PDAs, using a similar set of ADF Faces components.

Oracle Drive

Oracle Drive is the desktop client for Oracle Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) servers, such as Oracle Content Database Suite and Oracle Portal. Oracle Drive allows you to access Oracle WebDAV server files as a mapped drive in Windows Explorer, exposing the native Explorer functionality. Additional content store-specific options are accessible from right mouse menus. When you are disconnected from the network, you can use the offline and synchronization capabilities of Oracle Drive to manage files. You can also use Oracle Driv e to back up files from your hard disk to a server.


WebCenter Services

WebCenter Services incorporates Web 2.0 content, collaboration, and communication services that can be embedded directly into applications via portlets. In addition, APIs can be utilized in the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) to create custom declarative UIs and to integrate some of these services into business processes and application features. Oracle ADF is a J2EE framework that provides a visual and declarative development experience. For more information on ADF, visit the Oracle ADF home page.

WebCenter Services include:

• Oracle Content Server, an enterprise content management solution

• Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, through which your users can locate data and documents that are stored anywhere within your enterprise

• Oracle Communication and Mobility Server (OCMS)

o A presence server, so users can see when others who have logged into the application are online

o An instant messaging service, allowing users to communicate directly with other online users via text, voice, or video

o WebCenter Voice Option, offering a rich set of telephony infrastructure components (Click to dial, Voice over IP).

• A discussion forum application, enabling community discussions on a set of topics

• A wiki/blog server, allowing people to collaborate simultaneously on documents and share ideas

• WebCenter Ensemble (formerly BEA AquaLogic Ensemble) is a powerful enterprise mashup system that developers use to share HTTP-based services and programmable functions with other developers to use in new applications being developed, or to enhance existing Web applications. For all developers, the system becomes a library of reusable widgets, user interface (UI) artifacts, or basic programmable functions that can be shared among all Web applications, regardless of development language or host platform. In addition, WebCenter Ensemble centralizes common application functionalities, like security, audit, and activity tracking, allowing those functionalities to be applied to existing Web applications without the need to reconfigure them or write additional code. In this capacity, WebCenter Ensemble is an important system that IT will use to provide valuable deployment services to applications either initially designed without them, or to new applications at far lower cost than traditional methods.

• WebCenter Analytics (formerly BEA AquaLogic Analytics) delivers comprehensive reporting on activity and content usage within portals and


composite applications deployed using WebCenter Interaction WebCenter Analytics provides portal administrators, application developers and community managers with detailed information to help them better design, build and manage enterprise investment in composite applications. Metrics include community, page, content, collaboration project, portlet, and document usage. Portlet and page response times and number of user logins are tracked as well. Uniquely, WebCenter Analytics also allows correlation of results by any metadata attribute of the user who performed the action to effectively assess how applications and information are being used across the enterprise.

WebCenter Interaction

The collection of WebCenter Interaction Products (formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction) provides an open and extensible solution for accessing and unifying information, applications and business processes in heterogeneous environments. These products support cross-platform integration (Java and .NET) and a rich set of related business user tools for assembling content and building collaborative applications. These products include:

• Oracle WebCenter Interaction provides a platform independent portal solution with integrated security, management and user interface capabilities

• Oracle WebCenter Collaboration provides project team collaboration for documents, tasks and calendaring

• Oracle WebCenter Publisher provides simple web content publishing for business users

• Oracle WebCenter .NET Application Accelerator allows developers to integrate new or existing Microsoft ASP.NET applications and services directly into solutions built with Oracle WebCenter Suite

• Oracle WebCenter SharePoint Console is a packaged integration solution for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services that allows users to easily discover and retrieve SharePoint resources for use in enterprise-class deployments.

Oracle WebLogic Portal

Oracle WebLogic Portal connects people to business services through custom, service-oriented portals that deliver Web 2.0 interactive richness and application agility, while simplifying portal development and maintenance. With Oracle WebLogic Portal, you can streamline information access to improve productivity and response time and meet end user expectations for rich, responsive solutions. These solutions deliver Web 2.0 business value and maximize IT efficiency and software reusability.

Oracle WebLogic Portal simplifies, personalizes, and lowers the cost of customer, partner, and employee access to information, applications, and business processes.


Customers can develop, deploy, and manage all kinds of enterprise applications on a robust architecture by using Oracle WebLogic Portal’s unified portal framework, simplified portal lifecycle management, modular portal business services, and portal extensions.

BUILDING A WEBCENTER APPLICATION

Using the WebCenter Framework, you can easily build customizable applications by leveraging the customizable components. WebCenter Framework provides the foundation for including Web 2.0 services in applications, allowing you to add enterprise mashup capabilities that enable end users to get the content they require to get their job done. You can also integrate JSR 168, WSRP, and Oracle portlets into WebCenter applications and include content from disparate content repositories. Using WebCenter Framework, you can link components together so that they operate synchronously, resulting in a cohesive, easy-to-understand, easy-to-use application.

Making Applications Customizable

Customizable components provide the ability to customize the behavior of the application at runtime. These components enable the site administrator to make changes to the users’ view of the application content. For example, the administrator may decide to hide a certain piece of content or move a component from the bottom of the page to the top. These changes and settings are then persisted for end users.

Customization applied to the application is saved to a metadata repository, Oracle’s Metadata Services (MDS). All metadata, including base application definitions and runtime customizations, is stored in the central metadata store. This centralized metadata strategy allows WebCenter to bring together work done by information workers at runtime and IT developers at design-time in a single, complementary development lifecycle. This means that new versions of applications can be developed and deployed without losing any of the customization work done by information workers over the life of the product.

WebCenter Services provides two customizable components:

• showDetailFrame

• panelCustomizable

The showDetailFrame Component

A showDetailFrame surrounds one or more JSF and/or ADF components and can provide a border and a header with a menu for actions such as minimizing the content. A showDetailFrame component provides the following:

• Minimize, maximize, and restore the display of the contained component(s)

• Header and border around the contained component(s)

• Actions menu to perform specific tasks on the child component(s)


The panelCustomizable Component

A panelCustomizable component offers horizontal and vertical layout capabilities to a group of ADF components. Similar to a showDetailFrame component, a panelCustomizable component can display a header to provide menu actions. A panelCustomizable component enables you to do the following:

• Hide and show child components

• Rearrange child components within the panelCustomizable component

You can include JSF and ADF Faces components as items in panelCustomizable and showDetailFrame components on your application pages.

Building Portlets

The WebCenter Framework enables you to build and deploy portlets using the WebCenter Framework Extension for JDeveloper. The WebCenter Framework supports all the production portlet standards, including JSR 168 and WSRP 1.0, as well as a preliminary version of WSRP 2.0.

Oracle JDeveloper’s portlet creation wizards help you build WSRP/JSR 168 and PDK-Java (Portlet Development Framework for Oracle Portal 10g) portlets quickly and easily. Another set of wizards guide you through portlet producer deployment. For testing purposes, you can deploy your portlets to the WebCenter Preconfigured OC4J, which you can start and stop from the JDeveloper toolbar. This means that you never have to leave the JDev eloper environment while developing and testing your portlets.

Figure 3 – Building a Portlet Using the JSR 168 Java Portlet Wizard


Portletizing JSF Applications

Portletizing an application means making an application available as a portlet. A portletized application can be plugged into a portal, where end users can interact with the application in the same way they would with the stand-alone application. Portletizing provides a convenient mechanism for integrating disparate applications and publishing them in one convenient location for the end users. Business users can use portletized applications to create enterprise mashups.

The JSF-Portlet Bridge in Oracle WebCenter allows developers to portletize a JSF application as a JSR 168 portlet. The portletized application can then be consumed by any portal framework that supports the portlet standards, such as an Oracle WebCenter application or OracleAS Portal.

To publish a JSF application as a portlet, you must ensure that your JSF pages emit markup that conforms to JSR 168 portlet markup fragment rules. Most of the ADF Faces components render portlet-compatible markup.

When you portletize an ADF application, there are a number of guidelines and best practices to keep in mind. These are described in the Oracle WebCenter Framework Developers Guide.

Integrating Portlets

Your WebCenter applications can consume portlets. The WebCenter Framework portlet integration supports all the production portlet standards including JSR 168 and WSRP 1.0, as well as a preliminary version of WSRP 2.0.

Figure 4 – A WebCenter Application That Integrates Various Portlets

Before using the portlets in your application, you must register the portlet producer with the application. Registration informs the application how to access the producer. Wizards are available to guide you through the registration process. After successful registration, the portlets are automatically added to JDeveloper’s


Component Palette. You can drag individual portlets from the Component Palette and drop them onto your application pages as you would any other component. You can also use add Oracle prebuilt portlets and third-party portlets to your WebCenter applications.

Packaged applications often come with their own sets of portlets that enable you to access particular data or functions used by the application. Provided these portlets were built with compatible technology (WSRP, JSR 168, or PDK-Java), you can include them in your WebCenter application as well.

You can link portlets by passing parameters between portlets and ADF Faces components, and between portlets and the page. In this fashion, you can create a context-sensitive application, where the data displayed by the portlets changes depending upon the page context.

Business User Mashup Tools

In Web 2.0 terminology, a mashup is the result of integrating complementary elements from two or more sources. Without WebCenter Framework, creating mashups on the Web is a difficult and challenging task; using the tools provided by WebCenter Framework, however, business developers can create their own mashups in minutes. A set of declarative wizards guides users through the process of combining data and services to suit their individual requirements. WebCenter’s versatile publishing tools include:

• Rich Text/Blog Portlet: A portlet that offers browser-based, rich text editing at runtime. It allows users to author and publish formatted HTML on a JSF page. The Rich Text/Blog portlet is a useful tool for blogging or for posting enterprise announcements and news items. Once the portlet is added to a page, users with appropriate permissions can edit text items directly in the page. All the necessary editing tools are presented in place. Depending on the security privileges set for the page, the Rich Text portlet can be used to broadcast information (such as a simple blog) to a wide audience or to a more narrowly defined group.

Figure 5 – A Simple Blog Using the Rich Text/Blog Portlet


• Web Clipping Portlet: A browser-based declarative tool that empowers business users to create their own feeds with no programming required. In addition, users can use the Web Clipping Portlet to clip some information to determine whether they need to ask IT to provide a supporting feed. Using the Web Clipping portlet, users can create Web 2.0 mashups from nearly any source.

• OmniPortlet: A tool that allows business developers to quickly leverage Web services, RSS, and XML feeds as data sources for their enterprise mashups. Using a wizard-based approach, business users can quickly produce new mashups from all the standard feeds that developers produce. In addition, developers can easily build AJAX -based user interfaces and add them into the wizard for users to select. Figure 6 shows how quickly users can define new mashups from existing Web services and XML or RSS feeds.

Figure 6 – Building a Mashup with OmniPortlet Wizard

Portlet Interaction with ADF Faces Components

ADF Faces components and portlets are tightly integrated. They can reside on the same JSF page and can be contextually wired together in a declarative manner, without your writing a single line of code. User interaction in a portlet can trigger partial refresh on the page, making other components on the page rerender. Similarly, when the state of an ADF view component changes on the page, portlets can refresh their content, ensuring that they remain in context.

A User Interaction Example:

In the figure below, the drop-down list called “Volume for last” is a JSF component that determines the contents of the pie chart generated by OmniPortlet. When the user selects a value from the drop-down list, the value is passed to OmniPortlet. OmniPortlet reads the value and performs a partial page refresh, without causing the entire page to be refreshed.


Figure 7 - The Service Volume Distribution Portlet, Built Using OmniPortlet

Styling a WebCenter Application

Achieving a consistent and attractive look and feel is an important part of application design and development. Skins are the best way to globally style an application. Based on the CSS 3.0 syntax, a skin is a style sheet that is specified in one place for an entire application. Instead of styling each component or inserting a style sheet on each page, you can create one skin for the entire application. Every component automatically uses the styles as described by the skin. If an application is constructed to use a skin, no design-time code changes are required.

Web Center applications use ADF Faces for their visual components. ADF Faces components delegate the display of the component to a renderer. Renderers determine the different ways a component can be displayed on a client, or how to display the component on different clients. Included with ADF Faces are HTML render kits for display on both desktop screens and PDAs. Leveraging these renderers in combination with skins, you can customize how components are displayed; for example, you can change the orientation or location of tabs. By default, applications created using ADF Faces components use the Oracle skin, but you can create your own skin to change the colors, fonts, and even the location of portions of ADF Faces components, by setting styles for components in one CSS file.

Oracle ADF Faces provides three skins for use in your applications:

• Oracle: The Oracle skin, which is the default skin, conforms to Oracle's user interface standards for applications (known as Oracle Browser Look and Feel, or Oracle BLAF).

• Minimal: The Minimal skin is based Simple skin but includes some icons.

• Simple: The Simple skin contains almost no formatting and is the starting point for all custom skins.

All of these skins are included in the ADF Faces 10.1.3 component library.


In addition to the default skins, you can create your own custom skin with your company's preferred look-and-feel. Custom skins can extend or override the style definitions provided through the Simple skin. When you apply your own CSS, (that is, your custom skin), everything that you did not include in your CSS is inherited from the Simple skin. You are unlikely to customize the look and feel of every component available in the Oracle ADF Faces component library. By reviewing your application using the Simple skin, for example, you can determine the components to customize.

Integrating Content Using the Java Content Repository Standard (JCR)

A vital part of today’s businesses is managing document content, which is increasingly being managed by enterprise content management systems. Integrating content from these systems usually requires custom coding against proprietary and complex APIs, which makes creating new applications that leverage these content systems costly and hard to maintain or upgrade.

With the ratification of JSR 170, which specifies the Content Repository for Java API and the Java Content Repository (JCR), access to content becomes standardized and creating new applications that integrate content is made much easier.

Oracle WebCenter leverages the standard and provides an easy alternative to pure coding against JCR APIs for content integration. Using data controls (as specified by JSR 227), WebCenter hides the complexity of the JCR standard behind this generic framework, making integration simply a matter of dragging and dropping the relevant data controls into your application. Adapters written to the JCR API standard provide access to the underlying content system.

A data control is a container for all the data objects, collections, methods, and operations used to create UI components within your application. The data control abstracts the complexity of JCR and surfaces basic operations. As part of WebCenter you have access to five repositories:

• Oracle Content Server

• Oracle Content Database

• Oracle Portal

• MS Sharepoint

• Documentum

• IBM Domino.DOC (work in progress)

For development and testing purposes, you can also use the WebCenter’s JCR adapter for file system access.

Since JCR is a standard that is currently being adopted by a wide variety of vendors, the range of available adapters is steadily growing. In a case where you have content stored in a proprietary content system (for example, digital media assets), you can


create your own JCR adapter and use it together with the WebCenter Framework. Using the Content Data Control Wizard in JDeveloper, you can create and configure a data control to connect to a specific JCR repository. The data control can be used in your application, regardless of the adapter underneath it.

Figure 8 – Creating a Content Data Control Using the Data Control Wizard

Data Control Attributes

Every content management system stores many attributes for the objects that it manages. These attributes build a set of structured metadata around what is often unstructured information. Structured metadata is essential for categorizing content and for searches; hence, it is important to expose those attributes through an application that leverages the content in any way. The Content Data Control exposes all attributes: the ones that are common across all repositories, repository-specific attributes, and custom attributes.

Functionality Provided by the Data Control

To keep things simple, the data control surfaces real-world operations rather than the atomic API calls to allow easy application development. The functionality provided by the data control includes Search and Advanced Search, as well as getting the files and folders of a repository, the attributes of these files and folders, and the URL for a file’s content.


To use data control functionality in your application, simply drag the data control method or attribute from the Data Control Palette and drop it onto the application page as a view component. All the ADF bindings are automatically created for you.

Figure 9 - An ADF Tree Component for Browsing and Opening Files

Securing the Content Data Control

The main issue behind Content Management systems, besides organizing content, is controlling access to it; therefore, another major aspect of the Content Data Control is managing access or, rather, honoring access restrictions of the back-end repository. The WebCenter Framework provides full flexibility in terms of which user context is used by the data control: a Public user, a predefined user, or the user that is authenticated to the application and set in the JAAS security context.

Securing the WebCenter Application

Traditionally, J2EE applications are secured using container-based security constraints. These effectively map the path to a Web resource (a page) to a static role. Given that the mapping of these roles is defined within the deployment descriptor of the application, standard container security is extremely limited and inflexible. By their very nature, WebCenter applications are dynamic, runtime driven, and often involve input from the users with different levels of access. Therefore, the use of traditional J2EE container-based security is too static and limited in scope. ADF security addresses these limitations by introducing a declarative, dynamic security model based on the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS).

Oracle ADF implements JAAS through integration with JAZN (Oracle's JAAS provider). Although JAAS was designed to support both authentication and


authorization, it has, to date, required custom code to implement the authorization component of this service. ADF Security overcomes the hurdles to the uptake of JAAS-based authorization model by allowing for a fully declarative, dynamic JAAS implementation.

With ADF Security, the access policy is defined by the granting of a specific activity (such as view or customize) rather than a static association of role membership and Web resource (security constraint). While the required actions are deployed with the application, the users and roles granted these actions are mapped dynamically at runtime. Hence, changes in the security profile information (such as the post-deployment addition of a new role) are automatically applied without a need to redeploy the application. Furthermore, given that ADF Security is not constrained by the URL to a Web resource, you can declaratively define more granular permissions within your application.

Authentication

ADF Security extends the default authentication model of the J2EE container by supporting both an implicit and explicit authentication process. That is, as with a standard security constraint, accessing a secured resource automatically results in an authentication challenge if the user is not currently authenticated. In addition, ADF Security introduces a known authentication “end point”, allowing for the definition of standard login and logout links. This, along with the concept of public pages (described below), allows an end user to access public pages in a secured application without being forced to log in. A previously authenticated user can explicitly log out and still remain in the application (a concept not found in J2EE container security).

Implicit Authentication

When a user first accesses an application secured by ADF Security, the security processes interrogate the subject (the container that represents the user) and determine the user’s associated principals (user principal and role principals). If there is no subject–because the user is completely new–ADF Security creates a subject containing the anonymous user principal and the anyone role principal. The addition of these anonymous principals allows the un-authenticated user to access Web resources that are to be considered “public.”


Figure 10 - ADF Security Implicit Authentication

Explicit Authentication

In an explicit authentication scenario, an unauthenticated user (that is, a user with only the anonymous user principal and anyone role) actively clicks a Login link located on a public page. The Login link contains a direct request to the ADF Authentication Servlet, which is a component of the ADF security infrastructure. This Servlet acts as a known end point for a standard container-secured Web resource; that is, the Authentication Servlet is secured via a J2EE security constraint. Hence, an unauthenticated user attempting to access this Servlet is immediately directed to the container’s internal authentication logic. Given the container will only redirect back to the application secured by the constraint (in this case, the Servlet, not the original page being accessed by the user), the current “public” page is passed as a parameter on the request to the adfAuthentication Servlet. This allows it subsequently to redirect back to the page on which the Login link was located. Assuming a successful authentication, the user subject now contains its own user principal and role principals as well as the original anyone role principal.


Figure 11 - ADF Security Explicit Authentication

Authorization

The Authorization Editor exposes enterprise roles that are defined in the policy store and displays the actions (such as View, Invoke, and Edit) that may be applied to a specific component type (a page, a method, an iterator, or an attribute). To implement an authorization policy, the desired action is checked against the associated role. This is subsequently written to the policy store defined for the application, which is either a file-based repository or an LDAP directory. The policy itself defines a permission type, the resource that is secured, the actions that can be performed against that resource, and the user or role to whom that policy is being assigned or granted.


Figure 12 - Selecting Allowable Actions for Specific Roles in the Authorization Editor

At runtime, when the user attempts to access a secured page (such as mypage.jspx in figure 12) the Oracle ADF security filters intercept the request to determine whether the current user has appropriate access to that page.

In the unauthenticated user case, the anonymous user principal and the anyone role principal within the subject are used to define the user. Hence, if view privilege on the requested page had been granted to the anyone role, (such as the public.jsp page in figure 12) the user would be forwarded to that page.

Since mypage.jspx requires that the view privilege be assigned to a role other than anyone, the user is challenged to authenticate. After authentication, the user has a specific principal, which can be used to evaluate the security policy (that is, determine which role is required to view mypage.jspx and whether the requesting user is a member of that role). In this example, if the user were a member of the Staff role, then they would be allowed to navigate to mypage.jspx .

Similarly, for users trying to access a page on which they do not have the view privilege (secpage.jsp in Figure 12), access is simply denied.


Figure 13 - ADF Security Authorization

Deploying the WebCenter Application

In terms of deployment, WebCenter applications behave exactly like traditional J2EE applications except for the fact that, in addition to the deployed application code, they include any customizations applied to the application at runtime. Therefore, simply creating and deploying a packed EAR file to the runtime environment is not enough, as this would not carry over the customizations (both for the page and any portlets within the page). To address this additional complexity, the WebCenter Framework comes with the Predeployment tool to deploy the associated customizations along with the application itself. The Predeployment tool effectively automates the process of handling customizations, freeing up developers and administrators to focus on the overall deployment.

Figure 14 - The WebCenter Application Deployment Process at a Glance


While the steps required to deploy the application to production will differ based on the desired topology (development to test to production, develop to production, and so on) and the point in the lifecycle where customization is applied, the general lifecycle of a WebCenter Application is as follows:

• The application is developed using the WebCenter template, which specifies the packaging of the application code, runtime customizations, and configuration and connection details for any WebCenter services used by the application into a generic EAR file.

• After the generic EAR file is transferred to the deployment server, the Predeployment tool produces a targeted EAR file, which is specific for the server on which the application is going to run.

• The targeted EAR file is then deployed to a stand-alone OC4J or a full Oracle Application Server environment, using either Enterprise Manager or the command-line interface.

The Predeployment Tool

In order to account for the various methods of deployment used by J2EE developers, the Predeployment tool is exposed in three separate ways:

• The Embedded Predeployment Tool, which is embedded within the developer framework to allow one-click deployments from JDeveloper. Because the configuration information of the deployed application is assumed to match that of the developer’s machine, the developer is not asked for new configuration information.

• Command Line Predeployment Tool, which is a stand-alone version of the tool intended for use on the production server. This interactive tool walks the administrator through the connections and rewires the application as required. It also supports the recording of the administrator’s responses for subsequent deployments.

• ANT Tasks , which incorporates the Predeployment tool into ANT scripts, exposing WebCenter Predeployment tool’s functionality through a number of ANT Tasks. These correspond to the various functions seen in the command-line version of the tool.

Migrating Security and Application Roles

The WebCenter Predeployment tool does not migrate the security policies used by the application. Instead, this function is performed by the OracleAS JAAS Provider migration tool (also known as JAZN Migration tool), which migrates the policy data from the development environment’s XML-based provider (system-jazn-data.xml) to the policy store in the runtime environment (either an XML-based provider or an LDAP-based provider, specifically, OID). These providers function as repositories for realm, policy, and login module information.


ACCELERATING YOUR APPLICATION WITH WEBCENTER WEB 2.0 SERVICES

As part of WebCenter, a wide range of Web 2.0 services and tools is available for you to extend the functionality of your applications and enrich the end-user experience. These Web 2.0 services provide enterprises with a means to tap into the critical thinking of every employee to build better processes and make enterprise information (applications and content) more relevant to the entire organization. Earlier in this paper, we introduced some Web 2.0 services, specifically OmniPortlet, Web Clipping, and the Rich Text/Blog Portlet. The following section describes all the other Web 2.0 services that are integrated within WebCenter.

Secure Enterprise Search (SES)

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g enables a secure, high quality, easy-to-use search across all enterprise information assets. You can integrate WebCenter applications (ADF applications) into this unified search experience at two levels:

• Crawler-Based Approach: SES can crawl and index all content within all pages of the application. The crawler supports a number of built-in source types, as well as a published plug-in architecture for adding new types.

• Custom Search Approach: You can build a custom search UI in your WebCenter application by using the Web Services API that SES provides. Thanks to JDeveloper’s Web Services data control, this is very easy to achieve and requires little or no coding effort.

Figure 15 – Integrating SES into WebCenter Using the Web Services Data Control

Key features of SES include:

• Security: The ability to search password-protected sources securely. Oracle’s search technology provides single-sign-on (SSO) based security


where available, and it can also employ application-specific security where SSO is not available.

• Comprehensiveness: The ability to search across all your sources–Web pages, files-in-file servers or desktop drives, databases, applications, mail servers, and more.

• Excellent User Experience: An intuitive, out-of-the-box Web user interface for both search and administration which has both the clean look-and-feel and ease of use that users have come to enjoy for Internet searches.

• Relevant Results: Brings to the intranet a high level of relevance that users associate with Internet searches. This high search quality is enabled by number of patented improvements, including a new relevance model geared to the intranet.

• Sub-second Performance: New internal index design techniques provide high-performance, high-throughput queries over millions of documents.

For more information, visit the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search page on OTN.

Oracle Communication and Mobility Server (OCMS)

Oracle Web Center provides a scalable telephony infrastructure that you can use to embed telephony components such as call control and presence into applications built with Web Center. Out of the box, Web Center provides a Presence Server and an Oracle Communicator softphone, which can be used to extend a SIP-based instant messaging and voice/video network. Also available are Parlay X presence Web services APIs, which provide presence information to any WebCenter-based application. Examples of presence-enabled applications include package tracking, location-based services, and browser-based instant messaging. Finally, the Web Center Voice Option enhances the WebCenter offering by bundling a rich set of telephony infrastructure components based on JSR 116 (SIP Servlets). The SIP Servlet API and its associated Service Creation Environment enables development and deployment of custom telephony services such as click-to-call, call routing, call barring, conferencing, and voice mail.

For more information, visit the Oracle Communication and Mobility Server page on OTN.

Oracle Content Server

Oracle Content Server is the foundation for a variety of Oracle content management products. It provides a flexible, secure, centralized, web-based repository that manages all phases of the content life cycle: from creation and approval to publishing, searching, expiration, and archival or disposition. Every contributor throughout the organization can easily contribute content from native desktop applications, efficiently manage business content via rich library services, and securely access that content anywhere using a web browser. All content, regardless of content type, is stored in the web repository or database for


management, reuse and access. While stored in the repository, all types of content - ranging from e -mail, discussions, documents, reports, spreadsheets and records to images, multimedia or other digital formats - receive the same set of fundamental core services.

For more information, visit the Oracle Content Server page on OTN.

Discussions

Another WebCenter Web 2.0 service is discussion forums, which promote a sense of community and allow members to share and discuss information and opinions. Discussion forums are ideal for broadcasting thoughts to a wide audience or in situations where not all participants are logged on simultaneously. WebCenter discussion forums are powered by the award-winning Jive Software Forums technology. WebCenter Discussions is an open-architecture, standards-based discussion forum solution that provides several powerful features to boost community participation, facilitate question resolution, and promote knowledge reuse.

Developing Applications Embedding WebCenter Discussions

Oracle WebCenter Discussions has a rich set of APIs that allow developers to integrate Jive Forums directly into their JSF applications. The following is a broad overview of the major components in the system:

• Skin: The skin is the front end to the system, usually written in JSP or JSF. The skin is responsible for calling the APIs and displaying the results to users in HTML (or some other format). The default skin includes many features that can be configured through the administration tool, so most developers find that making small changes to the default skin will suffice. If more comprehensive UI or feature changes are required, a totally new skin can be created.

• Filters: Filters dynamically reformat the contents of messages to provide additional functionality. For example, the URL filter turns any URL that a user types in a message into a clickable link. Another filter syntax highlights Java source code. Filters are applied dynamically, and any number of custom filters can be created and installed.

• Core API: The core API provides all the business logic for creating, manipulating, and displaying discussion content. The core API is divided into a few different sections:

o Security: Security through permissions checking is implemented at the method level via methods that throw an UnauthorizedException. In this case, users that call the method without proper permissions will generate the exception.

o Extended Properties: Extended properties are used to store additional data about objects. Almost all major objects can have extended properties, including categories, forums, threads, messages, attachments, users, and


groups. The core APIs include a set of methods to add, set, get, delete, and iterate these extended properties.

o Internationalization: Internationalization is the process of changing the format of dates and numbers to obey rules unique to the user’s region and translating user-interface text to their language. This includes character encoding, handling international characters, translating the user interface, and testing the resource bundles that modified.

o Authentication: By default, Web Center Discussions calls a module that uses LDAP for authentication and accessing user data. You can configure the system to perform authentication and load user data from any other external system by implementing a few of the forums interfaces.

• Back End: A database is used to store all data. By default, it uses an Oracle database. Authentication and user and group storage is pluggable so that alternative back ends can be used as well.

Key Features

Key features of WebCenter Discussion’s architecture include:

• Open Standards: As a pure J2EE application, WebCenter Discussions is deployable on a wide variety of application servers including Oracle Application Server. The open database schema is available for many different databases, including MySQL and Oracle. Out-of-the-box support for LDAP or Active Directory authentication and user data integration is included.

• Easily Customizable: WebCenter Discussions are designed to be easily customized for your own deployment. Plug in your own authentication system, modify the user interface, use RSS or XML to access the data, or add your own processing logic using the full API.

• Scalable and Fault Tolerant: The server-side Java environment and extensive caching make WebCenter Discussions extremely fast. Leveraging clustering support in Oracle Application Server means the application can be deployed on multiple servers for scalability and fault tolerance.

• Secure: WebCenter Discussion applications have been proven secure by thousands of customer installations. The administration console includes role-based access rights and permission checking done at the Java method level to guarantee that users have access only to the content they should.

Key features of WebCenter Discussion’s functionality include:

• Simple and Powerful Interface: The interface is easy to use with a consistent look and feel and one-click access to commonly used tasks.

• Search: WebCenter Discussion forums can be crawled by SES, and search submission and results can be surfaced in WebCenter applications.


• Expert Search: Community members can locate other members by searching through basic information such as name or email address, or perform more complex searches through extended profile fields.

• Threaded, Flat, and Tree Mode: Messages can be viewed in several different modes: flat mode lists messages in chronological order, threaded messages are grouped by a specific subject, and tree mode shows one message per page with a tree structure for other messages in that topic.

• Email Notifications: Users are notified by email or the Web when information is updated.

• Web-Based Administration Tool: Administrators can easily delete, edit, and move messages; manage permission-levels; and organize the hierarchy of categories and forums.

• Permissions-Based Security: You can restrict users or groups from reading forums, creating new topics, or posting messages.

• Moderation Support: Moderators can screen and edit messages before they are posted.

• Role-Based Administration: Use role-based administration to designate multiple users or groups as system administrators, forum administrators, or moderators.

Wiki

A wiki is server software that lets teams freely create and edit Web content using any Web browser. Wiki users can access and edit the information from anywhere. The standards-based, open-source wiki server that is included with Oracle WebCenter brings wiki capability to WebCenter applications, helping team members to collaborate and share knowledge.

Basic features of WebCenter Wiki include:

• Page Versioning : As contributing users make edits to a wiki page, the wiki server keeps track of the previous changes. This functionality allows users to audit the changes and track how their pages evolve.

• Viewing and Restoring Versions: After a change has been made, a user may need to revert a wiki page to a previous version. The wiki server allows users to preview the previous version of the page and then restore it, if required.

• Search Integration: All wiki pages can be searched using SES and the crawler-based approach. In addition, the wiki server exposes a set of open APIs to give developers the means to integrate any search engine.

• Page Locking: When a user is editing a page, other users are able to view, but not edit, the same page. When the first user has finished with the edits,


another user is allowed to edit the page. This prevents users from overwriting each other’s updates.

• Page Reference/Breadcrumbs: As more and more users create wiki pages, WebCenter Wiki provides an easy-to-navigate way of traversing pages and uses a breadcrumb model to indicate which pages have been visited.

• List of Most Recent Updates: As wiki pages are added and updated, users can go to one place to see a listing of the most recently changed pages.

• Ratings: Users can rate a wiki page. The average rating of a Wiki page is exposed so that other users can see it.

• Data Storage in Database: All Wiki pages and their content are stored in the Oracle Database.

Key advantages of WebCenter Wiki include:

• Web Services Interface: Almost all Oracle WebCenter Wiki functionality is also available through Web services that can be used to integrate with Oracle WebCenter custom Web applications.

• Corporate Security Layer : Oracle WebCenter Wiki is available with JSSO (standards-based Java Single Sign-On) for enhanced enterprise security. JSSO minimizes the risk of malicious usage. Your corporate datastore can be used to add role-based privileges to your wiki pages and operations.

• Concept of Domains: Wiki pages are organized into domains, which are the highest level of categorization. Each domain can have its own customized menu, page layout, and customized security.

• High Availability (HA): Complete HA is available for the Wiki service.

Blog

A blog is a specialized site that allows an individual or group of individuals to share a series of events and personal insights with online audiences. The Blog service enables users to create a user blog that serves as an online personal diary

Basic features of WebCenter Blog include:

• Manipulating Bl og Entries: Users can create, edit, and delete entries in their blogs if they have the correct permissions. A rich text editor is provided.


• Calendar: The Calendar on the left shows dates when entries have been made so that you can

o Navigate to various months to see entries on any date.

o Click on a particular date to view all blog entries on that date.

• RSS: Blog entries are available as RSS feeds.

• List of Friends: Every user can add other users to their list of friends. Friends can:

o Provide other friends direct links to their profile and blog

o Send messages to friends

o Show friends of their friends

• Profile Page: On each user’s profile page, you can see the list of her latest activities. There’s also an Activities link.

• Comments: You can add comments to the blog of another user or to a community blog.

• Enable/Disable: Every user can enable or disable his blog.

• Data Storage in Database: All Blogs are stored in the Oracle Database.

WebCenter Ensemble

In addition to providing valuable deployment services to help improve the management of Web resources for IT and administrators, WebCenter Ensemble also provides an intuitive application-composition and –mashup system for developers. Developers can register and share components and programmable functions with other developers, and WebCenter Ensemble helps blend those components with other applications and resources it manages. WebCenter Ensemble simplifies the reuse of widgets and programmable functions, and eliminates the need for developers to understand the ins and outs of every programmable function.

Pagelets

Developers register their applications within WebCenter Ensemble as a unique, reusable resource called a Pagelet. Any service that is URL-addressable and returns markup is a candidate for a Pagelet. For each Pagelet, WebCenter Ensemble generates a unique identifier—or tag—that the system directly maps to the Pagelet. This tag—a simple string of XML—can be transformed by WebCenter Ensemble when inserted into any other page or resource registered within the system. Because


the tag is simple XML, and is transformed by WebCenter Ensemble, Pagelets can be embedded on any Web page, running on any platform, and written in any language.

Pagelets can contain their own styles and JavaScript. When inserted on a page, they can also include arbitrary attributes and a payload, or custom data. These parameters are passed by WebCenter Ensemble to the specific Pagelet for processing. As an example, a threaded discussion Pagelet might require an ID or name for the project the discussion is contained in, or the name for the overall project. A charting Pagelet might require an XML payload of data to chart.

Tag transformation

As WebCenter Ensemble delivers a page for a given resource, it scans the page for specific tags defined elsewhere within the system, and transforms the tag into the appropriate Pagelet, injecting functionality dynamically into the page. As a simple example, a developer could register the Google Search box as a Pagelet. WebCenter Ensemble would represent this Pagelet as a simple string of XML, for example, <pt:search:Googlebox>. For any other resource where that tag resides, WebCenter Ensemble replaces the tag and dynamically injects the UI and functionality of the Google Search box directly in the page.

Adaptive Tags

WebCenter Ensemble includes a set of other predefined tags that can be used in both Pagelets and resources. These Adaptive Tags enable logical functions on the page (e.g. pt:logic.if) for iterating through collections (pt.logic.foreach) for determining the role of the user (pt.runner.roleexpr, etc.).

The Adaptive Tag library is a powerful tool for integrating UIs in a consuming page. The entire library is invoked using XML and transformed by WebCenter Ensemble, making it completely cross-platform.

Figure 16 - Registering a Pagelet

Scripting framework

WebCenter Ensemble makes available a client-side JavaScript framework that serves two functions. First, it allows Pagelets to share information with the


preference and eventing features it provides. Second, it provides features to make JavaScript-based mashups easier, like XML-handling functions. WebCenter Ensemble injects the scripting framework intelligently, only including it when the page requires.

Improving Relevancy with WebCenter Analytics

Metrics from WebCenter Analytics can be accessed through a web-based analytics console application or through portlets tailored by portal administrators, both integrated into WebCenter Interaction. This makes the product extremely easy to learn and to deploy. The console allows data to be displayed as tables, bar charts, pie charts or line charts. Information can be filtered and correlated using any user characteristic, such as department, user type, role or country. The user can choose multiple date ranges and limit reports using criteria such as ‘top five’ or ‘least popular’. All report data can be exported to reporting tools such as Excel® with a single click. Users have access to a broad range of reports, including:

• Community traffic

• Portlet usage

• Document downloads

• Discussion postings

• Document uploads

• Log-ins

• Searched keywords

• System response time

• User turnover

• Visit duration.


Figure 17 – The WebCenter Analytics Console

Portlet templates & the Query API Every report in the analytics console is available as a template from which custom portlets can be created, allowing managers to plug analytics portlets into any community or application deployed through WebCenter Interaction. The portlets can be customized and pre-configured to report on activity within that community-providing valuable insight to the owners or managers of that community. Community managers can easily spot trends such as increasing or decreasing access and the popularity of specific portlets or content accessible through the pages and resources they manage. This information allows for pragmatic changes to publishing processes and community content, rearrangement of features, and the tactical promotion of underused but important documents and information. Furthermore, developers can access all Analytics data through a SOAP based API. Using this API, developers can build valuable new applications that lever Analytics data to create portal communities and applications that respond automatically to certain usage patterns. These new applications in turn provide a much more dynamic and engaging experience for the business user.

Real-time metrics & load balancing Analytics captures information from WebCenter Interaction through real-time events that are passed from WebCenter Interaction to the Analytics Collector and immediately stored in the database. This provides deeper, more accurate and more timely information about system activity than can be provided by web analytics software tools, which typically only monitor batched historical information from application server logs and require extensive configuration. Analytics provides a global filtering option, allowing administrators to eliminate the capturing of usage data from specific users, departments or monitoring tools such as SiteScope. Analytics can be deployed in a clustered fashion to provide failover capabilities during periods of high activity and improve overall system performance.


SEAMLESSLY BRIDGE DIVERSE PLATFORMS WITH WEBCENTER INTERACTION

WebCenter Interaction

WebCenter Interaction (formerly BEA AquaLogic Interaction) is a user-experience framework that provides Web integration and interface services for deploying a broad range of solutions. These include portals and composite applications with unique capabilities for collaborative and social applications that seamlessly combine search, publishing and knowledge management. WebCenter Interaction supports cross-platform integration and the rapid assembly of Web-based user interfaces, allowing your enterprise to deploy valuable business applications more quickly and at a lower cost.

WebCenter Interaction provides all of the capabilities you need to create and deploy information, content and application resources to users inside and outside your enterprise. Key features of the solution are:

UI framework: Easily deliver a unified Web environment, with personalized pages, portlets, and easy navigation to applications and communities. Templates support rapid creation of pages, portlets, content, projects, applications and Web services.

Communities: Provide a common workspace for teams, departments, customers, partners and other unique user groups and deliver the information and applications they need in one place.

User experiences: Create entirely different interfaces on your portal with unique security, branding and design, meaning you can easily support intranet, extranet and internet portals in a single deployment.

Social Interaction: Allow employees to customize rich profile pages, track colleagues’ activities, update status and identify experts based on explicit and implicit criteria.

Unified security: Allows you to build composite user profiles from multiple directories or custom information sources such as ERP and CRM databases. Enterprise systems are protected with unique Web gateway technology.

Performance and stability: An advanced HTTP engine supports calls to remote Web services, allowing you to deploy and manage hundreds of applications.

Intuitive administration: Create and deploy pages, communities and applications easily. Customize the content, capabilities and design to meet user needs. Delegate management of thousands of portal objects without high administrative overhead and handle common management tasks in a scalable manner with automated service capabilities.

Flexible customization: Use a broad range of templates and advanced development technologies including JSF, .NET Web Controls and Adaptive portlet technologies to deliver powerful solutions quickly.


Web services integration: Support deep integration with existing systems through standards-based data, content and identity services. APIs allow easy integration of external systems and applications.

Standards support: Develop integration services using a broad range of Web standards, including SOAP, JSR-168 and WSRP.

Cohesive Suite integration: Seamlessly extend centralized security and administration to other Oracle products to provide collaboration, enterprise search, social bookmaking, web publishing, wikis, blogs, business process management and portal usage analytics.

Notification Services: Easily track changes to pages, communities, employee profiles and projects via RSS and email notifications.

WebCenter Collaboration

WebCenter Collaboration (formerly BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration) helps project teams share resources and is flexible enough to bring together users inside and outside your organization. Whether you require team workspaces or are planning to enable rich collaboration with customers and partners, WebCenter Collaboration has the comprehensive features you need to get the job done and return real value to your enterprise. Key features include:

Project workspaces: Configurable web-based workspaces support an effective project—and community-centric collaboration model.

Document management: A forum for sharing documents, with Web editing and version control, associated tasks and discussions, email notifications, RSS feeds, custom document properties, Microsoft Office integration, and integrated publishing and search.

Document tagging: Via integration with Oracle AquaLogic Pathways, users can apply custom tags to collaboration projects, documents and discussions to aid in future discovery.

Discussions: A searchable set of discussions, with support for moderation, email alerts for project participants and the ability to archive discussions.

Task management: A task console allows users to create and assign tasks with dependencies and due dates. View project timelines, import Microsoft Project files and automatically maps tasks to resources.

Universal calendar: Community calendars and personal calendars provide a view of events, tasks and milestones from selected projects, and synchronize with Exchange or Lotus Notes calendars. Users can choose to synchronize with an entire shared calendar or on an event-by-event basis.


Email notifications: Subscribe to projects, folders, individual documents, discussions and tasks lists. Users can choose from immediate, hourly, daily and weekly summary email notifications.

RSS notifications: Every project, folder, document, discussion and task list generates an RSS feed that can be viewed in any RSS reader. Users also are provided with a secure personal RSS feed that aggregates all of their subscriptions into a single feed.

Personal projects: Store draft documents, tasks and notes in a secure online workspace, and share with others at any time.

Intuitive Web-based interface: Web-based dragand-drop user interface with the look and feel of a desktop application that is easy to deploy to partners and customers without compatibility issues. Extensive usability features include a bulk publishing function, zip download, and a recycle bin.

Email integration: Contribute content to a project via email, open and edit documents from email notification messages and contribute to community discussions via your email client.

Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon Plug-In: Check-in documents, check-out documents, add personal tags, add custom properties and send notification links directly from Microsoft Office 2007.

Web services integration: Embed WebCenter Collaboration in your business applications. Remote API available in both Java and .NET. Platform flexibility: Deploy on Windows or UNIX platforms including Linux. Access via Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers.

WebCenter Publisher

WebCenter Publisher (formerly BEA AquaLogic Interaction Publisher) makes it easy to publish new Web content to WebCenter Interaction pages, communities and applications. Using WebCenter Publisher, business users without Web programming skills can create valuable content in a controlled, consistent way. WebCenter Publisher captures information from users and routes the information to the appropriate parties for approval. The information is then published to applications via portlets, to WebCenter Interaction’s Knowledge Directory as Web pages, or to intranet, extranet and Internet sites. The main features of this process are:

Data-entry templates allow users to create their own Web pages by entering text and uploading images into templates developed by an administrator.

Rich text editing allows users to create visually rich content without requiring knowledge of HTML or other Web development skills.

Presentation templates ensure branding consistency across the pages, communities and applications deployed through the portal.

Workflow empowers business users to simplify common content-approval processes.


Scheduled publishing and expiration allow users to schedule publishing for a future date and time, and automatically remove content from pages and the search index.

Desktop integration through WebDAV and WebEdit allows users to bulk-import content, manage files from their desktop and check out, edit, and check in

content seamlessly.

Library services ensure that authors do not unintentionally duplicate or override one another’s work.

WebCenter Sharepoint Console

Companies where Windows Sharepoint Services (“WSS”) is used find that it lacks some enterprise-ready features needed to facilitate wholesale adoption. Since many WSS sites are not officially supported by IT and instead started by the departments or even smaller groups in a department, WSS sites become information silos. Users looking for a document or discussion must first know which of the potentially hundreds of WSS sites the document is in before they even start searching for it. This also makes finding all of the content about a particular topic across all WSS sites very difficult.

The WebCenter SharePoint Console helps solve this problem by presenting a unified view of SharePoint resources to information workers across the extended enterprise. The WebCenter Interaction enterprise-class content and search services help improve employee productivity by enhancing the ability to find the information that is more relevant and valuable to the user. It also helps organizations harness the true potential of their existing IT investment in Windows SharePoint Services.

The WebCenter SharePoint Console imports and indexes resources such as documents, discussions, and events across various Sharepoint instances into WebCnter Interaction. These resources can then be displayed in composite applications via special SharePoint Console portlets or any of the other standard portal mechanisms such as search and snapshot queries. The SharePoint Console portlets can also display non-SharePoint information as well.

WebCenter .NET Application Accelerator

WebCenter.NET Application Accelerator (formerly BEA AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator) allows developers to integrate new or existing Microsoft ASP.NET applications and services into portal solutions powered by WebCenter Interaction or WebLogic Portal®. Whether it’s leveraging existing visual development tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, or service-enabling .NET applications, WebCenter .NET Application Accelerator helps increase developer productivity and reduce project development costs.

WebCenter AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator offers customers the most flexible approach for increasing the return on investment in Microsoft’s .NET Framework by enabling ASP.NET 2.0 applications and services to be deployed in


portal solutions powered by WebCenter Interaction and WebLogic Portal. This solution includes the following key features:

.NET WSRP Producer: Consume .NET applications in WebLogic Portal over WSRP, thus providing services-oriented interoperability between Java/J2EE applications and .NET applications on an enterprise portal platform.

ASP.NET Portlet API: Easily create ASP.NET 2.0 portlets with the new ASP.NET Portlet API. The API inherits from ASP.NET 2.0 base classes and leverages the ASP.NET page lifecycle to provide simplified coding, better error handling, and improved logging and debugging capabilities for portlet development. The resulting portlets are consumed by WebLogic Portal and WebCenter Interaction via WSRP and REST-based services respectively.

Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates: Use the Visual Studio project templates to rapidly create WSRP projects for WebLogic Portal or ASP.NET portlet projects for WebCenter Interaction. The project templates are preconfigured with all the associated API libraries and runtime dependencies required.

Visual Studio 2005 File Templates: Benefit from built-in file templates that allow developers to easily create new WebCenter Interaction portlet and preference pages or WSRP portlet pages.

.NET Web Control Consumer 3.1: Leverage out-of-the-box or third-party ASP.NET 2.0 Web Controls such as data access and form input/validation controls to add rich functional components in your portlets with minimal coding. The .NET Web Control Consumer manages the HTTP response transformation to ensure multiple portlets with distinct .NET artifacts are surfaced on the portal properly, maintaining the interactivity of each portlet and their related controls.

Hot deployment of .NET Portlets over WSRP: Continuously add .NET applications to WebLogic Portal without having to restart the WSRP service. Integrated API Documentation: Access the ASP. NET Portlet API documentation directly from Visual Studio 2005.


Figure 18 - Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE Integration.

CREATE ENTERPRISE PORTALS USING ORACLE WEBLOGIC PORTAL

Oracle WebLogic Portal embraces Web 2.0 user interface richness, responsiveness, and simplified application building. By leveraging dynamic interface scripting and REST frameworks, Oracle WebLogic Portal provides client-side JavaScript and a simplified architecture for handling events, making asynchronous portlet updates, accessing portal context objects, and interacting with resources at a given URL.

With support for mash-ups, portlet publishing, and portlet federation, Oracle WebLogic Portal enables users to rapidly create and share applications across both portals and Web applications. This simple, lightweight technology makes the combination of services easier to use and faster to deploy than ever, enabling new solutions to challenges not easily addressed before.

Because portals are typically developed in a team development environment, Oracle WebLogic Portal supports production operations with tools that enable you to manage the portal life cycle.

WebLogic Portal lets you harness a variety of technologies and techniques for creating rich, interactive WebLogic Portal applications. Rich and interactive portal Web applications use a variety of technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, JSON, and patterns such as REST. These technologies and patterns allow developers to create increasingly responsive and highly interactive Web applications.

The following features help you deliver Web 2.0 interactive richness and agility:

• Oracle WebLogic Portal REST API: Used for retrieving, modifying, and updating portal data dynamically from the client. Typically, these


operations include reading, writing, editing, and removing. In the case of Oracle WebLogic Portal, a resource might be a portlet, page, or book.

• Disc Framework: Sometimes used in combination with the Oracle WebLogic Portal REST API, Disc (Disc Dynamic Interface SCripting) provides a client-side JavaScript API for handling events, making asynchronous portlet updates, and accessing portal context objects. Disc context objects encapsulate descriptive portal information, such as portlet positions within placeholders, titles, labels, and so on. The information returned in context objects can be used as parameters to REST commands to modify the portal. When you drag and drop portlets in Oracle WebLogic Portal, you are employing the Disc Framework and REST API.

• Portlet Publishing: Makes Oracle WebLogic Portal-hosted portlets available to any Web application over HTTP, and enables portlets to be surfaced in any Web page. With Portlet Publishing, for example, you can render portlets within a Struts or Spring application, or any other non-portal Web page.

Oracle WebLogic Portal’s development framework enables you to customize your portal user interfaces and simultaneously surface them in multiple types of devices. For example, you can surface your application in a desktop browser with a portal look and feel, and simultaneously surface your application in a handheld device with a look and feel that is more appropriate for mobile devices.

Interaction Management

Additionally, Oracle WebLogic Portal provides an interaction management framework that enables you to create portals that:

• Users can personalize.

• Track interactions that your users have with their portal applications.

• Trigger custom actions when specific events occur.

Oracle WebLogic Portal’s interaction management features enable you improve the visitor experience, increase adoption and loyalty, and achieve your goals for customer interaction with your portal.

Search, Content Integration and Publishing

Oracle WebLogic Portal is delivered with the following features that help you search for content and access content from anywhere:

• Virtual Content Repository: This feature enables you to federate multiple compatible content management systems (whether third party or Oracle repositories) into a single interface, where you can centrally manage content and provide dynamic access to it in your portal applications. Because the Virtual Content Repository maintains connections with all associated content


repositories (according to parameters you set), it can provide services such as a single search (a search that returns a result set from all the relevant content across the plugged in repositories), Delegated Administration (discussed later in this presentation) and content type management. Oracle WebLogic Portal is also delivered with its own content repository.

• Content Presenter Portlet: Enables users to retrieve and display different kinds of content in a portal in real time, without assistance from your IT Department or software developers. Following are some examples of how you could use the Content Presenter portlet:

o Display a list of the most recent press releases that users can browse and read.

o Add images such as photographs or charts—or add textual content—to a portal page.

o Segregate content by subject matter for different target audiences.

Security

Oracle WebLogic Portal security leverages the security features of Oracle WebLogic Server, which support and enhance J2EE security services. Like other J2EE components, J2EE security services are based on standardized, modular components. Oracle WebLogic Server implements these Java security service methods according to the most up-to-date standards, and adds extensions that handle many details of application behavior automatically, without requiring additional programming.

The open, flexible security architecture of Oracle WebLogic Server delivers advantages to all levels of users and introduces an advanced security design for application servers. Companies now have a unique application server security solution that—together with clear and well-documented security policies and procedures—can assure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the server and its data.

In addition to the Oracle WebLogic Server security features, Oracle WebLogic Portal contains:

• User Management: You can use third-party user stores for authentication or retrieval of user properties, in addition to Oracle WebLogic Portal’s LDAP user store and authentication functionality. Oracle WebLogic Portal’s unified user profile framework enables you to create and maintain user profile properties that are directly associated to users, regardless of which user store contains the user accounts. User profile properties are key components in features such as personalization and access control.

• Visitor Entitlement: With Oracle WebLogic Portal’s visitor entitlement features, you can


specify user access to specific desktops, books, pages, and portlets. For example, in a Human Resources desktop, you can specify that only managers have access to manager-specific portlets, or that only partners have access to a particular desktop.

• Delegated Administration: You can choose the administrative users that have access to specific Oracle WebLogic Portal Administration Console tools, and set different levels of administrative rights on those tools. For example, you can grant an administrator access to a single content repository folder, and restrict administrative rights to publishing—but not editing or deleting—content.


CONCLUSION

Oracle WebCenter is an exciting new offering from Oracle. It brings together the power of standards-based development and portals to provide context-rich applications that dramatically improve efficiency. It provides the natural user interaction environment for your SOA applications and allows you to utilize a wide range of services including structured and unstructured content, business intelligence, business processes, communication, and collaboration to create better, more effective user experiences. And, because Oracle WebCenter is a core component of Oracle Fusion Applications, the applications you build with WebCenter will seamlessly blend with both the current and future applications from Oracle.

Oracle WebCenter Suite 10gR3 Technical White Paper

March 2009

Author: Christian Hauser

Oracle Corporation

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Oracle WebCenter Suite 10gR3 Technical White Paper · users enhancing information worker productivity and the value of existing IT investments. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)