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Q: If your Web applications aren’t broken, why “fix” them with a disruptive transition to a portal infrastructure?
First, let’s talk about the benefits of centralizing and rationalizing IT structures. Portals are a mainstay of enterprise architecture, bringing thousands of Web applications into a centralized resource so that organizations can boost agility and decrease time to market. A federated portal infrastructure enables an enterprise to maximize its use of resources and roll out new products and services more rapidly, closing the gap between business needs and IT capabilities.
But if you have Web apps that are working just fine, it’s hard to justify the disruption, even for the sake of a long-term payoff. With BEA WebLogic Portal 10, though, you can make a smoother transition. WebLogic Portal 10 features a REST (Representational State Transfer) producer, for sharing portlets and portal services with Web applications outside the portal. This new capability is a major advance: it allows you to simply enhance existing Web apps by developing new services as portlets and embedding them into those Web apps, instead of putting new development effort into the Web app itself. Eventually, your Web app will be getting most of its functionality from portlets. When it’s time to consider a major refresh to the Web app, that’s an ideal opportunity to transition to a portal. This approach of incremental adoption leads smoothly and almost painlessly to the benefits of portal infrastructure: distributed management, the ability to serve different audiences more effectively, personalization, and so on.
Q: What’s the role of standards in centralizing and federating portals?
The industry standard is WSRP—Web Services for Remote Portlets. It’s key to enabling architects to build with confidence and bring together portlets into a unified system. It defines the contract between consuming and producing systems so that different departments can produce portlets and at the end of the day, bring them together in a seamless federated system. BEA is involved in the WSRP specifications committee and is a leader in implementing the features of this standard. We’re continuing in that tradition, by providing an implementation of the latest specification: WSRP 2.0.
Q: Does the WSRP standard define enough for federation to be practical today?
New technology standards take time to mature and evolve. BEA has always taken a leadership role in adopting standards for implementation, and that’s exactly what’s happening with the WSRP 2.0 standard and BEA WebLogic Portal 10. In developing a pragmatic approach to portal federation, BEA talked with hundreds of customers about their needs and chose a federation implementation that extends the standard and includes the capabilities customers considered most important. These include simple publishing of groups of portlets, the ability to federate all portlet types regardless of technology, customization interceptors, and integration with service infrastructure software to better manage these distributed portal services.
Q: What if an organization has some non-standard Web applications?
Many organizations have Websites and Web applications that are not WSRP-aware. BEA Weblogic Portal 10 enables you to inject standards-based portlets directly into non-compliant Web apps. This provides architects and developers with an array of options. A developer builds a portlet, and that portlet can be surfaced using a non-federated portal, a federated portal based on WSRP, or to any other Web page using the REST producer. Once again, the point here is to smooth your transition. You don’t need to rip and replace, because this product provides an easy path from legacy Web apps to a state-of-the-art portal infrastructure.
Q: In what way does BEA WebLogic Portal 10 align with Web 2.0?
BEA WebLogic Portal 10 embraces Web 2.0 usability and open programming principles like REST. The REST producer, for example, doesn’t just empower developers to inject new life into old applications, but also enables creation of enterprise mashups, another important Web 2.0 advance that brings together pieces of applications—such as Google gadgets, Web app functionality, or custom portlets—into consolidated, interactive Web pages for users.
BEA WebLogic Portal also delivers built-in AJAX support. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a method of building interactive applications for the Web that responds to user actions using lightweight requests to the server. What it means for architects is that you can now support rich Internet apps without slowing down responsiveness, because AJAX enables you to update part of a Web page dynamically, without needing to refresh the entire page. For example, a user can click in a portlet and see that portlet update, without having to refresh other parts of the portal page. Additionally, this technology supports connecting portlets together so they can share data, updating related portlets dynamically. As a result, users can get rich Web pages and immediate interactivity. By baking AJAX into the framework of WebLogic Portal, we’re helping organizations get a jump start on their Web 2.0 rich internet application development.
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