Categories
bdg dev2dev Featured Posts Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Oracle Announces Roadmap for Plumtree / AquaLogic / WebCenter

UPDATE 2: I’ve incorporated all the great feedback and comments from ex-Plumtreevians, ex-BEA and ex- and current Oracle folks.

UPDATE: A bunch of Plumtreevians are contributing really good comments on this post over on Facebook.

bea_think_oracleI worked at Plumtree Software, Inc. from June 1998 to December, 9th 2002. In four-and-a-half years, the company grew from 25 employees to over 400 and it had thousands of happy customers before it was purchased by BEA Systems in 2005 for $220M. Here at bdg, we’ve been supporting dozens of Plumtree/AquaLogic Interaction (ALI)/WebCenter Interaction (WCI) customers since we opened our doors in December of 2002.

Back around 2005, BEA’s BID (Business Interaction Division) still had a lot of really smart engineers from Plumtree working on a lot of really interesting things, including Pages (think CMS 2.0), Pathways (kind of an enterprise version of del.icio.us) and Ensemble (the portlet engine/gateway, minus the overhead and UI of the portal itself).

They were also working on an enterprise social network, kind of a Facebook for business if you will.

However, there was a lot of wrangling at BEA, primarily between BID/AquaLogic and BEA’s flagship product, WebLogic (the world-class application server). Most of the strife came in the form of WebLogic Portal vs. AquaLogic/Plumtree Portal nonsense. Senior management at BEA, in their infinite wisdom, had taken a “let’s try not to alienate any customers” policy and in the process they confused all their customers and alienated/frustrated quite a few of them as well. They renamed Plumtree to AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI), put in place a “separate but equal” policy with WebLogic Portal (WLP) and spewed some nonsense about how WLP was for “transactional portal deployments” vs. ALI for .NET and non-transactional portals, but no one, including BEA management, had any idea WTF that meant. To further confuse the issue, the WLP team, which also had a lot of really smart engineers, built products like “Adrenaline” (which was basically a less-functional and more buggy version of Ensemble) rather than do the unthinkable and integrate Ensemble into WLP so that WLP could finally host non-Java/JSR-168 portlets.

I was really pissed about BEA’s spineless portal strategy, their “separate but equal” policy between WLP and BID/ALUI and their waste of precious engineering resources in an arms race between WLP and ALUI rather than just stepping back, growing a spine, and coming up with a portal strategy.

Because I can’t keep my pie hole shut, I started several loud, messy and public fights with BEA management. Why? Because the real loser here is the customer.

And BEA, because management got mired in politics and chose to waste engineers’ time on in-fighting and competition instead of building enterprise Facebook, which Steve Hamrick and I arguably already wrote in our spare time. All they needed to do was product-ize that and they would have owned that market.

In 2008, Oracle inherited this clusterfuck of a portal strategy when they bought BEA for $7B+, giving me new hope that cooler heads would prevail and fix this mess. The first thing they did was fire all the impotent BEA managers who were afraid to make any decisions. It took Oracle a while, but alas, they have finally arrived at a portal strategy that makes sense. I first learned about this strategy when I crashed the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board last Thursday.

First of all, let me say this: under the leadership of Vince Casarez, current (and future) customers are in good hands.

I realized when he said “everyone still calls it Plumtree” that this was going to be a bullshit-free presentation.

He also said something regarding the “portal stew” at Oracle that puts all of my ranting and raving in perspective: “Oracle did not buy BEA for Plumtree or WLP, just like it didn’t buy SUN for SUN’s portal product.” To rephrase that, Oracle bought BEA for WebLogic (the application server, not the portal) and Sun for their hardware (not for Java, NetBeans and all the rest of Sun’s baggage).

So, let’s face it, portals are a relatively insignificant part of Oracle.

However, they’ve finally did what I called for 2008 and what BEA never had the wits to do: pick a single portal strategy/stack and stick to it. SO, if you’re a current Plumtree/ALUI/WCI or a current WLP customer, you have a future with Oracle.

Here’s the plan, as I understand it.

All roads lead to Web Center (not Web Center Interaction, but Web Center)

At the heart of Web Center will be WebLogic’s app server and portal. Plumtree/ALUI as a code base will be supported, but eventually put into maintenance mode and retired. You get nine or twelve years of support and patches (blah blah blah) but if you want new features, you need to switch to the new Web Center, powered by WLP. CORRECTION: WebCenter will not be “powered by WLP.” At its core will be the Oracle-developed, ADF-based WebCenter Portal running on WebLogic Server.

All the “server products” (Collaboration, Studio, Analytics, Publisher) will be replaced by Web Center Services or Web Center Suite

Publisher will be subsumed by WCM/UCM (Web Content Management / Universal Content Management, formerly Stellent). The other products will be more-or-less covered by similar offerings in Suite or Services.

What about Pages, Ensemble and Pathways?

Pages is dead as WCM/UCM does it better. Pathways is getting rolled into the new Web Center somehow, but I’m not sure how yet. Perhaps I can follow up with another blog post on that. Ensemble has been renamed “Pagelet Producer” — more on that below. CORRECTION: Pathways is now called “Activity Graph” and it will be part of the new WebCenter. Think of an enterprise-class version of the Facebook News Feed crossed with Sales Force chatter and you’ll be on the right track.

What about .NET/SQL Server, IIS and everything else that isn’t Java?

This is a really interesting question and the key question that I think drove a lot of BEA’s failure to make any decision about portal strategy from 2005-2008. Plumtree had a lot of .NET customers and some of the biggest remaining Plumtree/ALUI customers are still running on an all-Microsoft stack. In fact, one of them told me recently that they have half a million named user accounts, two million documents and 72 Windows NT Servers to power their portal deployment.

So, let’s start with the bad news: Oracle doesn’t want you to run .NET/Windows and they REALLY don’t want you to run on SQL Server.

(That will change when Oracle acquires Microsoft, but that’s not gonna happen, at least not any time soon.) WebLogic app server and WLP/WCI, to the best of my knowledge, will not run on SQL Server. They will, however, run on Windows, but I would not recommend that approach.

It’s inevitable that large enterprises will have both .NET and Java systems along with a smattering of other platforms.

So, if you’re a .NET-heavy shop, you’ll need to bite the bullet and have at least one server running JRockit or Sun’s JVM, one of Oracle’s DB’s (Oracle proper or MySQL), WLS/WLP/WCI and preferably Oracle Enterprise Linux, Solaris or some other other flavor of Un*x. CORRECTION: WLP will run on SQL Server. Not sure about the new WebCenter Portal, but my guess is that it does not.

Now, for the good news: the new WCI, powered by WLP and in conjunction with the Pagelet Producer (formerly Ensemble) and the WSRP Producer (formerly the .NET Application Accelerator) will run any and all of your existing portlets, regardless of language or platform.

This was arguably the best feature in Plumtree and it will live on at Oracle.

.NET/WRSP and even MOSS (Sharepoint) Web Parts will run in WebCenter through the WSRP Producer. The Pagelet Producer will run portlets written in ANY language through what is essentially a next generation, backwards-compatible CSP (Content Server Protocol, the superset of HTTP that allows you to get/set preferences, etc. in Plumtree portlets). So, in theory, if you’re still writing your portlets in ASP 1.0 using CSP 1.0 and GSServices.dll, they will run in the new Web Center via the Pagelet Producer. Time for us to update the PHP and Ruby/Rails IDKs? Indeed it is. Let me know if you need that sooner rather than later.

How do I upgrade to the new WebCenter?

Well, first off, you have to wait for it to come out later this fall. Then, you have to start planning for what’s less of an upgrade and more of a migration. Oracle, between engineering and PSO, has promised to provide migration for all the portal metadata (users, communities, pages, portlets, security, etc.) from Plumtree/ALUI/WCI to the new Web Center, with WLP at its heart. (Wouldn’t it have made sense for some of those WLP engineers to start building that migration script in 2005 instead of trying to compete with ALUI by building Adrenaline? Absolutely.) All your Java portlets, if you’re using JSR-168 or JSR-286, will run natively in WLP through a wrapper in WebCenter Portal. Everything else will either run in the WRSP Producer (if it’s .NET) or in the Pagelet Producer (if it’s anything else). The only thing I don’t fully understand yet is how to migrate from Publisher to UCM, but I’m due to speak with Oracle’s PSO about that soon. Please contact me directly if you need to do a migration from Publisher to WCM/UCM that’s too big to do by hand.

The only other unanswered question in my mind is how the new WebCenter will handle AWS/PWS services — the integrations that bring LDAP/AD users and profile information/metadata into Plumtree/ALUI/WCI. I wrote a lot of that code for Plumtree anyway, so if Oracle’s not working on a solution for the new Web Center, perhaps I can help you with that somehow as well. CORRECTION: User and group objects are fully externalized in Web Center, so there is no need for AWS/PWS synchronization. (Thanks, Vince, for pointing that out.)

So, that’s my understanding of the new portal strategy at Oracle.

Kudos to Oracle’s management for listening to their customers, making some really hard decisions and picking a path that I think is smart and achievable.

I’m here to help if you have questions or need help with your portal strategy or technical implementation/migration.

Q&A;

(Some other notes about discussions that have spawned from this original post.)

Q: What’s the future of the Microsoft Exchange portlets (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and the CWS for crawling Exchange public folders. Retired and replaced with something Beehive related? Still supported? For how long? Against what versions of Exchange?

A: We’ve got updated portlets for Mail & Calendar in WebCenter now for Exchange 2003 & 2007. We don’t have a Contacts portlet but it could be added quickly if we see a large demand. Crawling public folders can be done with an adapter we have for SES [Oracle Secure Enterprise Search] already. We’re working but aren’t done with a new version of KD on top of the new infrastructure that will come out post PS3. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: If migration scripts are provided to move WCI metadata into WebCenter, I understand that a portlet is a portlet, but what about pages and communities, users and groups, content sources and crawlers, etc.? Do they all have analogous objects in WebCenter or is there some reasonable mapping to some other objects?

A: Pages and Communities follow a model where we extract/export the meta data and data, then run it through a set of scripts that create a WebCenter Space for each Collab project/community and a JSPx page for every page. Users and Groups will come out of the LDAP/AD directory they are already using and the scripts associate the right permissions to each of the migrated objects. I don’t recall what we did about crawlers but since we use SES directly, all the hundred or more connectors we ship for SES are now available for direct usage. The scripts go through a multiphase approach to move content, then portlets, then pages, then communities so that dependencies can be fixed up versus trying to do a manual fix up. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: Will any existing WCI-related products that are slated for retirement (e.g. Publisher, Collab, Studio, Analytics, etc.) be re-released with support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, IE 8, IE 9 or Chrome?

A: For Publisher, we are planning a set of migrations to quickly move them to UCM. For Collab & Studio, we have new capabilities in WebCenter Spaces to match these functions. For Analytics, we’ve also rebuilt it on top of the WebCenter stack with over 50 portlets for the different metrics and made sure we provide apis/ access to the data directly. These analytics data also feeds the activity graph in providing recommendations for people on the content and UIs that are relevant to them. These are tied into the personalization engine that we brought over from the WLP side. So there is a rich blending of the best features from WLP with WCI key features. As for Neo [the codename for the next release of WCI], we are certifying the additional platforms. On the IE 8 front, we’ve just released patches for WCI 10gR3 customers to be able to use IE8 without upgrading to Neo. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Upcoming Oracle Web Center Interaction Training

Just wanted to let you know that I (formerly Plumtree’s Lead Engineer, worked with hundreds of different Plumtree, BEA and Oracle customers and now an Oracle ACE Director) am leading a public training course over the next two weeks and if you’re interested, there are few available slots left.

We’re partnering with training provider Peak Solutions and you can find the full details on their web site. Here’s the critical information:

THIS Monday, May 3rd and Tuesday, May 4th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Administration – $1,200
Deployment planning, installation, configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc.

NEXT Monday, May 10th, 11th and 12th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Portlet Develoment in Java and .NET (also Ruby and PHP) – $1,800
Hello world all the way through advanced portlet dev concepts like setting preferences and using caching

Please drop us a note if you’d like to attend. There are only 4-5 slots left, so please act now to reserve your space!

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

One Portal to Rule Them All

I won’t rehash what’s already been said by everyone in the press and the blogosphere — Oracle is buying BEA. I wrote almost three years ago that this was inevitable, and now it’s upon us.

I’m hopeful that the BEA/Oracle management crew can take what they learned from the Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline (for BEA) and Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oblix (for Oracle) acquisitions and apply it to the challenges their own merger presents.

Over the past three years, Oracle has acquired dozens of companies. The most notable were probably PeopleSoft (which had just acquired JD Edwards, if I remember correctly), Siebel and Oblix, which gave them a great suite of HR apps, CRM apps and identity management, respectively. These were all enterprise software products that Oracle had, with a modicum of success, built on their own from the ground up, sold and supported as “Oracle Apps.”

Of course, with almost every major company they’ve acquired, Oracle has picked up a portal product. (And with BEA, there’s a special bonus — they get two: WLP and ALI.)

That’s going to create a portal soup consisting of at least the following ingredients:

  • Siebel Portal
  • JD Edwards Portal
  • PeopleSoft Portal
  • Oracle Portal (part of Oracle Fusion Middleware)
  • WLP
  • ALI

Oracle won’t want to endanger existing customer relationships by terminating support for the non-horizontal portals from Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. Besides, the word “portal” really only loosely applies there, because those “portals” are really just web UIs into Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.

But what about the horizontal portals: Oracle, WLP and ALI?

They are all playing in the same space. It’s already questionable that we need all three in the market now. And three under the same circle-shaped roof that is Oracle? Absurd.

What will Oracle do with this portal quandary?

Well, I think they’ll do the only thing they can do and support all the products. So that covers legacy customers, but what about future customers? If I’m an Oracle sales rep and my customer wants to buy a portal to front their SOA stack, what on earth do I sell them?

In my opinion, which is just that — my opinion — post-merger, there need to be some decisive acts from Oracle regarding the future direction of their portal strategy.

And, again, IMO, this is where the ALI portal and the ALUI suite of products (formerly Plumtree) can really shine. Why? Because not only can you front Java, .NET, Rails, PHP and any other web application stack with ALI, but ALI already has integration kits for Siebel, PeopleSoft, JSR-168, WSRP and five different flavors of SSO, including Oblix! (Not to mention the obvious fact that since day one, ALI has run beautifully on Windows and *nix systems using Oracle’s bread-and-butter product, their database.) So naturally, if you’re an Oracle shop running a clustered Oracle DB for storage, Siebel for CRM, PeopelSoft for HR, Oracle Financials for the books and Oblix Identity Management, no other product under the sun has more pre-packaged, no-brainer integration and integration options than ALI.

It may be a hard, bloody battle to get Oracle to drop it’s own beloved portal product in favor of AquaLogic Interaction, but I think it’s a battle that needs to be fought.

Same goes for WLP. In fact, I think every product acquired by Oracle has to fight for it’s life and fight to be the #1 product in the space, retiring the others to “maintenance and support” but focusing all futures on the product that is rightfully #1. And I think — and hope — that Oracle has the good sense and the wherewithal to encourage this.

It may cause some near term pain, but taking a longer-term view it’s the right thing to do.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Interesting post, Chris. Obviously this is something we ALUI consultants have been considering in the past few days. One monkeywrench I have for you: as far as I know, Oracle offers their portal product for free to existing customers, whereas we (obviously) charge for it. I wonder how that kind of business model might change the landscape of how the ALUI portal is distributed/used.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 7:02 AM

  • Funny you should mention the price issue. About two years ago, we had a customer switch from ALI to Oracle portal for that exact reason. Why pay for licenses and support for ALUI products when Oracle gives you the portal for free? That customer still calls on us for ALUI support, so apparently the migration hasn’t gone exactly as planned.Two old adages come to mind here:
    1. You get what you pay for.
    2. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

    Regarding #1, the products really don’t cover the same feature set — Oracle portal cannot be the gateway to SOA that we all know ALUI is, so it’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison.

    Regarding #2, with any free software, whether it’s from a large company like Oracle or from the Apache Software Foundation, you always need to think about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If you need to build services integration points in Oracle Portal to talk to all of Oracle’s other products, that adds to your TCO. Moreover, if somebody is giving something away, what sort of quality expectations do you have about the product? What happens if you need to request support from Oracle or ask them to develop a patch for you? All of a sudden, the fact that you didn’t pay for the software comes back and bites you in the butt. 🙂

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 7:23 AM

  • I guess I agree with you, since I’m not an Oracle portal consultant (not yet, anyway); but I think the bigger question is how Oracle will assimilate these new portals given its current pricing strategy (aka – the bloody war you speak of). If I were an existing Oracle customer, the first question I’d ask is “how come I can get XYZ portal for free but not ABC portal”. And if I’m Oracle product management, I’m thinking about how my current “free portal” strategy has been working out for me versus the ALUI model of charging for it.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 8:22 AM

  • You’re right — the big issue is how will Oracle deal with the portals they’re acquiring and will there be a shakedown or more of a graceful assimilation.There’s a similar issue with WLS and Oracle’s application server, although I think in that case the answer is a little less complicated. 😉

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 8:32 AM

  • Of course you completely forgot to mention Oracle WebCenter. In spite of your assertions, there are only 2 portal products at Oracle. Oracle Portal and WebCenter. WebCenter is the future “face” of Fusion Applications, so any integration of portal products will move in that direction. IMHO….plumtree is as proprietary as Oracle Portal, and its dead. WLP and the folks on the WebCenter team will need to figure out how to integrate the code bases of those two products since they are the most similar in their support of Web 2.0 futures.

    Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on January 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM

  • Thanks for the correction about Oracle WebCenter — I’m not too familiar with Oracle products other than the DB and I should have done more homework before posting this!However, I still disagree that there are only two portals at Oracle. I’m not too sure about JDE, but I remember with 100% certainty that PeopleSoft and Siebel called their UIs “portals.” They’re not truly portals in a horizontal sense like Oracle Portal, WebCenter, WLP and ALUI and I don’t think they’re actually relevant to this discussion, so it’s a moot point.

    Now, given the four remaining portal products, I challenge your assertion that WebCenter and WLP “support Web 2.0 futures” and I’d like to see some examples that support that claim. As far as I know, the only products coming out of BEA that deserve the “Web 2.0” label are AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. (Note I don’t include ALI itself as a Web 2.0 product, despite the fact that ALI 6.5 has some pretty slick social features that might someday earn it that distinction.)

    I also take issue with your calling Plumtree/ALUI proprietary and I’m not sure what makes you make that claim. It’s written in Java and ported to C#.net, so it runs “natively” on IIS (which no other products from BEA or Oracle can do). Its Java version (from the same source base), runs on WebSphere, WLS, Tomcat and probably JBoss and other app servers and it supports both Oracle and SQL Server, so in terms of how and where you can run it, it’s probably the most open and flexible product in the entire 40+ product lineup that BEA boasts.

    That’s just one side of the proprietary vs. open argument. The other is how well one supports standards for plugging in functionality. In those terms, I think ALUI stands out from the pack as well. It supports portlets over two very well supported standards: HTTP and HTML, which again makes it the most flexible portlet development environment on the market. (You can develop ALI portlets using ANY web server that speaks HTTP and I’ve personally done so using Java, .NET, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails and even Domino if you can believe that.) It also supports JSR-168 and WSRP. (In reading about WebCenter, all portlet development documentation was Java-centric, so I’m not sure if they support any other kind of portlet development, e.g. .NET. It’s crucial that any product which claims to be the “face of SOA” supports at least Java and .NET development and plugins; however, many would argue that you need to support much more — e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.)

    Leaving portlets out of the picture for a moment, consider the other ALUI integration points: AWS, PWS, CWS and SWS. All of them use SOAP, which is a documented open standard. In fact, in my next blog post (which went up last night), I talk about how I integrated a custom MySQL/Ruby on Rails user store with ALI using a Rails-based SOAP-driven web service to interface with ALI’s user management system. It just doesn’t get any more open than that. At last year’s Participate conference, I demonstrated how you could use the ALI “face” to front WLS applications written to run on the WL message bus and communicating with data stores using DSP, proving that you integrate ALUI products with pretty much anything. I would like to see how a WebCenter consultant or a WLS guy would approach integrating Siebel or PeopleSoft, two products now in the Oracle family.

    I may make many “assertions” (as you call them), but they’re backed up by solid facts. I’m open to continuing this dialog because I want to hear more facts about 1) how you perceive ALUI as a proprietary technology and 2) how WLP and WebCenter claim to support “Web 2.0.”

    Posted by: bucchere on January 20, 2008 at 6:10 PM

  • Out of respect of SEC rules, I won’t touch the Oracle topic. But as for WebLogic Portal (WLP)…2) how WLP … claim to support “Web 2.0.”There are a bunch of features that contribute to the overall Web 2.0 story for WLP. Look at the WLP Groupspace application, for example. Web 2.0 is about publishing social applications that get better the more people use them. Groupspace is such an app. It is first a packaged social app ready to go out of the box, but secondly shows off many of the WLP features in the area of “Web 2.0”.

    Groupspace doc link (community framework, RSS, Groupnotes (think wiki), discussion forums, shared document repository, calendar, contacts, etc, etc).

    Also, read up on Josh Lannin’s blog to see what will be out shortly in terms of WLP and REST, more Ajax, more Portlet Publishing (Google Gadgets, RoR, PHP, etc). Lannin’s WLP futures

    Cheers – PJL

    Posted by: plaird on January 21, 2008 at 8:30 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Upcoming AquaLogic Training Classes in DC

bdg is hosting an AquaLogic (Plumtree) Training Class in Washington, DC the week of September 24th.

We’ll be sticking with the format we used last time:

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: ALI Administration
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: ALI Portlet Development

Wednesday will be a “double up” day when we do advanced administration for admins and introductory administration for developers.

Training will run 9AM-5PM each day with a break for lunch. The location will be as follows:

Nextec Corporate Headquarters
465 Herndon Parkway, Suite 200
Herndon, VA 20170
Please contact us at [email protected] to sign up!

ALI Administration (Mon, Tues, Wed)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of all the most commonly used aspects of AquaLogic Interaction (ALI). Students will learn how to install, configure and administer the ALI 6x portal. It is also for the person wanting to understand how to conduct an ALI implementation project. In three days you will implement a portal that can be used as a departmental solution. All aspects of ALI are reviewed including MyPages, Automation Servers, Search, Web Services, Portlets, Communities, Experience Definitions, the Knowledge Directory, and best practices to keep the portal up and running smoothly.
Course Modules
  • ALI Architecture
  • Basic Troubleshooting of the ALI Environment
  • Configuring the Automation Server and Jobs
  • Performing Routine Portal Maintenance
  • Creating an Administrative Hierarchy
  • Configuring Portal Access and Permissions
  • Implementing Advanced Object Security
  • Community Fundamentals
  • Creating a Community
  • Advanced Community Topics
  • Building Subportals
  • Configuring ALI Web Services
  • Importing Users and Groups
  • Extending the User Profile
  • Adding Content to the Portal
  • Maintaining the Knowledge Directory
Exercises
  • ALI Enterprise Planning Role Play
  • Using PTSPY and the Migration Utility
  • Using the Admin Hierarchy
  • Creating a Community
  • Creating a Subportal
  • Registering an Authentication Source
  • Registering a Profile Web Service
  • Managing the Knowledge Directory
After the training, the student should be able to:
  • Register Automation Servers
  • Create, run and troubleshoot Jobs
  • Perform routine Portal maintenance
  • Use PTSPY and the new Migration Wizard
  • Create Users and Groups in the Portal  Set up Activity Rights for users
  • Manage permissions using Access Control Lists
  • Create Communities
  • Create Projects in Collaboration Server
  • Create Experience Definitions and understand their use
  • Configure Web Services
  • Configure an AD Authentication Web Service
  • Configure a User Profile Web Service
  • Understand all of the content management objects in the Portal
  • Create a Crawler to allow access to external content through the Portal
  • Maintain Portal content and its search index
  • Implement Portal best practices

ALI Portlet Development

This course is an all-inclusive portlet development course that will coverbasic through advanced ALI Portlet development concepts. Although there is a small lecture component, the course is primarily exercise-based. Students who meet the prerequisites and who successfully complete all of the exercises will leave the course ready to design and write enterprise class ALI Portlets.
Prerequisites:
Basic understanding of the Plumtree Portal, MPPE & Portlets; proficiency in Java or C#; proficiency in web programming.
Course Modules/Exercises
  • Introduction to ALI, the MPPE, Portlets & C#/.NET or Java
  • Demonstration of ALI Portal and Integration Products
  • Install a Java IDE and come up with an idea for a new Portlet
  • Design an ALI Portlet and create a associated objects; add to MyPage and Community
  • HTTPGP/MPPE & the Gateway
  • Yahoo! Search Portlet: Design a portlet that allows the user to issue a search in Yahoo!
  • TCP Tracing: Use a free utility to trace TCP activity on port 80 (HTTP); observe CSP in action
  • Interaction Development Kits
  • Gateway Specific Configuration
  • Design an ALI Portlet that uses a Gateway Setting
  • Introduction to Settings
  • Change Font Color: Use a Portlet Setting to allow the user to personalize the Portlet with a font color
  • My Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that displays an end-user customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
  • Settings Review
  • Community Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that allows the community manager to set a customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
  • Introduction to Portlet Frameworks and Database-driven Portlet Design
  • Database Schema: Design database schema for a Data
  • Entry and Browse Framework Portlet
  • Administrative Settings Review
  • Administrative Settings: Design the Administrative Preferences page for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Data View/Entry Form: Design Data View/Entry Form for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Record Browsing: Design Record Browsing for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Portlet Caching, Performance and Scale-ability
  • Caching: Add ETAG/IF-NONE-MATCH caching to Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Enhance Record Browsing with Pagination, Sorting and Filtering
  • Internationalization/Localization
  • Create a Localized Portlet
Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Four ALI IDKs at your Disposal — Fifth One on the Way?

As most of you already know, there are four IDKs out there in IDK-land. To take a step back, if you’re really new to ALUI (formerly Plumtree) development, you can read about how ALUI handles portlets and how an IDK helps you write portlets. So, back to the four IDKs. They are all freely-downloadable from BEA — I’ve included links here:

*These two IDKs were written by developers at bdg and then released to the open source community on dev2dev’s CodeShare.

edocs warns you in boldface type: always use the IDK. That’s sound advice, given that the IDK API isolates you, as a portlet developer, from changes to the underlying protocol that ALUI uses to communicate between the portal and portlets (CSP). However, what if you’re not writing a portlet in Java, .NET, Ruby or PHP? As an aside, once upon a time, there were Perl and ColdFusion GDKs (predecessor to the EDK/IDK), but these development kits are no longer maintained by anyone, although I know for a fact that the ColdFusion GDK is still in use by an ALUI customer because it came up during a sales call!

So, back to my “what if” question: how can you write a portlet without an IDK? It’s actually not too hard if you’re just getting information from the portal. However, it gets challenging when you start setting preferences and then it starts to get really painful when you start dealing with Unicode issues, encrypted settings and some of the other really hairy stuff. So that’s why edocs implores you to use an IDK, when one is available.

If you do go down the road of writing a portlet in a language where an IDK isn’t available, I highly recommend that you at least abstract out your CSP calls such that they’re isolated from the rest of your portlet code. While you’re at it, you might as well follow the same API that BEA uses; in other words, write your own IDK (or at least the parts of it that you need to get your portlet done). To get you started, here’s how BEA probably implemented one of the IDK methods in Java:

public AggregationMode getAggregationMode() {
  if (!request.isGatewayed()) {
    throw new NotGatewayedException("Request not gatewayed.");
  }
  
  if (request.getHeader("CSP-Aggregation-Mode").equals("Multiple"))
    return AggregationMode.Multiple;
  } else {
    return AggregationMode.Single;
  }
}

So, go forth and write your own IDK. Or, preferably, ask a bdg-er to write one for you!

On a related note, one of our customers recently asked us to build an IDK for Lotus Notes/Domino in LotusScript. We’re trying to figure out if other people might be interested in this IDK so that we can decide if we’re going to open source it or do it as a consulting project (or some hybrid of the two). If you are interested in LN/Domino development for ALUI, let us know by commenting on this blog. I always love hearing feedback from users of the PHP and Ruby IDKs as well.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Hi Chris. We have a couple of remote portlets on web servers running Perl so I looked around for awhile for the original Perl IDK but couldn’t locate it, so I’ve written a Perl module that supports the methods provided by IPortletRequest. They’re read-only methods but are really all we needed access to. man-page is here…
    http://webdev.co.nz/Perl/IPortletRequest.txt Is this worth placing in codeshare do you reckon? I don’t see a lot of action in the forums concerning Perl use.

    Dean Stringer ([email protected])

    Posted by: deeknow on March 22, 2007 at 2:00 PM

  • Hello Dean! The original Perl GDK was written so long ago that I’m not sure how much good it would do. It was based on CSP 1.0 and it followed the old GSServices API rather than the new com.plumtree.remote.portlet API.

    I’m pretty stoked to find out that someone else has written at least part of an IDK — that’s impressive. Do I think it’s worth posting to CodeShare? I haven’t heard much talk about ALUI and Perl, but I guess it can’t hurt.

    Posted by: bucchere on March 22, 2007 at 5:03 PM

  • Hi, Chris. We would love to have a Lotus Notes/Domino IDK available to us, as we have lots of “legacy” applications in Domino that we want to expose in ALUI, and an IDK would certainly help! Just my nickel’s worth… 🙂

    Posted by: kcepull on March 30, 2007 at 11:21 AM

  • Thanks for your comment. If you don’t mind my asking, would you be willing to pay for such a thing or is it only a nice-to-have that you would download and use if it were opensource, but not pay for it if it were a commercial product?

    Posted by: bucchere on March 31, 2007 at 6:07 PM

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Portals and SOA: Portals in a Service-Oriented Architecture

I’ve been invited to give the following talk at BEA Participate:

Why is a Service-Oriented Architecture important to an IT infrastructure and what are the elements and products needed to build out an SOA? These questions answered, plus a discussion on how portals are the practical starting point to leveraging SOA.

Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo, but I assure you this talk will be light on the trite — you won’t hear me use the acronym SOA more than once or twice — and heavy on the real deal, rubber-meets-the-road stuff about how mere mortals/human beings are actually accomplishing the sort of things that SOA evangelists are preaching these days.

So, here’s what you can expect: I’ll talk a bit about some of the challenges of building integrated user experiences in today’s enormously complex and heterogeneous IT environment and show how a software developer — without superpowers — can piece together an integrated true-to-the-principals-of-SOA application using ALUI, ALDSP (Data Services Platform) and ALESB (Enterprise Service Bus). This will culminate in an actual, real-life demo.

I will of course make sure to sacrifice a chicken to the Almighty Goddess of Demos or do whatever else I have to do to make sure my demo doesn’t crash. Scratch that, I’ll just run it on Linux and everything will be fine.

So, all joking aside, if you have any ideas for items you’d like me to include in (or exclude from) my talk, please post your comments here. I’ll be sure to give anyone who makes a good suggestion a “shout out” during my presentation. They’re actually giving me a whole hour this time, so they’ll be room for plenty of tomfoolery, geekspeak, silly anecdotes and still time to answer your insightful questions at the end. As one of my good friends and business partners said following my talk at last year’s BEA World,

you never know what to expect during one of [Chris Bucchere’s] talks.

I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but of course I took it as a compliment.

In closing, while we’re on the subject of BEA Participate, I just wanted to say thanks to Christine “Obi” Wan for giving me the opportunity to present and, more importantly, for putting together such a great-looking agenda, which you can review if you like, because now it’s posted on the BEA Participate site.

In the meantime, do your best to convince the powers that be at your company/organization that they will finally discover the secret to “leveraging SOA” if they send you to this conference. Also, please don’t mention that every past Odyssey has had several open bars.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Working with Aqualogic we all know how it’s easy to plug in our portlet into Aqualogic. We don’t need Aqualogic portal running on our own computer to do this, we don’t need special IDE, we don’t need upload wars into portal. It took time to explain this to my experience J2EE collegaes that got some experience with IBM Websphere. Here what they do there:
    http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0410_barcia/0410_barcia.html
    A lot of steps pretty much the some but have a look at step 11. Here is the core difference. So at least one benifit of SOA is that we don’t need to do step 11.

    Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:03 AM

  • >Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an >invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo True, I have the some issue. In my article (for russian development network) I want to stress SOA architecture of Aqualogic, but I don’t want to use SOA word. Audience is pretty techical so they all pretty much feed up of this word. Hmm, may be I will end up with this:
    Avoid nightmare of step number eleven !
    At least, “what the hell this guy talking about?” will be more predict reaction. 🙂

    Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:25 AM

  • Hi Dmitri! Thanks for your insightful comments.As I’m building the demo for my talk, I’ve noticed that these SOA tools encourage you to loosely-couple everything. And that’s a good thing. As you pointed out, ALUI fits into this nicely with its loosely-coupled portlet architecture. The evil “Step 11” (too bad it wasn’t “Step 13”) is: “Select the Browse button and navigate to the WAR file for your portlet, then select Next (Figure 17).” Step 11 has some pretty awful implications for the enterprise. First off, it assumes that everything is Java, which, as much as I love Java, is just wrong wrong wrong in the heterogeneous enterprise. Secondly, it tightly couples your portlets to your portal, which is contrary to SOA.As an aside, I was listening to some Web 2.0 podcasts in the car the other day, and this guy who worked on Google Maps talked about “seams” in an architecture. To paraphrase, he basically said that everyone misuses the word “seamless.” Seams, just like in the textile industry, are critical to enterprise architecture. Just as seams hold swaths of fabric together and separate one bit of fabric from another, they also help define boundaries in the enterprise architecture that are equally critical to SOA. Without seams, everything must be homogeneous — applications must be bought from the same vendor, run on the same OS, be written in the same language, etc. — and this is completely contrary to the reality of enterprise software and systems and completely anti-SOA.

    To illustrate how not being “seamless” is actually a good thing, I’ve designed a demo system that involves bits of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), bits of Java, bits of .NET and bits of Adobe Flash all held together with seams built with ALDSP, ALESB and ALUI. I’m still working on the technical side of things, but the use case is simple: a sales rep wants to quote his customer. Behind the scenes, his company is running a LAMP CRM server, a Flash/SQLServer product database, a .NET portal, and a Java-based Collaboration Server. Using a hybrid of ALDSP, ALESB and Java and .NET web services, the user experience is easy and seamless, but behind the scenes, it’s the powerful seams supported by ALDSP and ALESB that make this not only possible, but fairly straightforward.

    If you’re interested in hearing more, register for BEA Participate and [shameless plug]come to my talk[/shameless plug]! By the way, I’m co-presenting with Joseph Stanko, the BEA Engineering Manager responsible for the development of Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner) — he will run several slides to help you understand the theory behind SOA and I will show the reality of how the AquaLogic stack truly enables SOA in the enterprise.

    Posted by: bucchere on April 14, 2007 at 6:07 AM

  • Alas, I’ve finally finished my demo. I had some configuration issues with ALSB, but ultimately they boiled down to the interface between the keyboard and the chair, i.e. human error. I had the proxy service calling the business service, which, in turn, called the proxy service again. You should have seen the utter wasteland this little tidbit of mutual recursion made of my machine. Actually, I was impressed — Java would spit out a JVM_Bind error once it exceeded some internal maximum, but ALSB (running on WLS 9.2) would actually keep running. Nice.Anyway, now that I’m past all that, I have an ALDSP layer over two disparate data sources (one MySQL DB containing CRM info and one HSQL DB containing product info) exposing data through netui/beehive to a single ALI portlet. (The nifty little portlet uses script.aculo.us to show an interesting new take on the age-old concept of master-detail.) I also included an Adobe Flex-driven portlet. The two portlets use some client-side IPC (inter-portlet communication) to exchange info and then they call a proxy service on ALSB that takes info from both sources and creates a Word document (in the form of a sales quote). The business service also uploads this document to ALI Collaboration so that people can work on it collaboratively before sending it to the customer. (I may replace this last little bit with a .NET web service, just to show that Java and .NET are both acceptable alternatives for writing the “glue” or “seams” in a true service-oriented architecture.)Lastly, the event coordinators have locked in a time slot for us: Monday, May 7th at 4:30 PM in the Technical/Developer Track.

    If you’re “participating” it would great to see you at our talk or at the bdg booth. This year we have a cool — yet practical — giveway that will definitely brighten your day. Looking forward to the conference!

    Posted by: bucchere on April 22, 2007 at 7:52 PM

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

WLP + Adrenaline = ALI?

I recall sitting in a meeting in 1998 where we were discussing how to aggregate portlet content into a portal page. We talked a lot about iframes but couldn’t consider them as a serious integration option because of security, scalability/performance, caching and portal-to-portlet communication. Instead, we spent the next year building and testing the HTTPGadgetProvider, which later came to be called the “(Massively) Parallel Portal Engine.” (The term “Massively” was later dropped and I believe the name “Parallel Portal Engine” or PPE for short finally stuck.) I won’t go into details about how the PPE works, but if you’re interested, you can check out this great page in edocs that sums it up nicely.

So anyway, iframes are certainly reasonble way to build a portal in a day. But, in terms of building a robust enterprise portal that can actually withstand the demands of more than say, ten users, and that will pass even the most rudimentary security evaluation, iframes are complete nonsense.

So, today, during my lunch break, I attended Peter Laird’s Webinar, which he advertised in his nascent blog. It was all about enterprise mashups, a topic by which I’m very much intrigued. (Recall that PTMingle, my winning entry in the 2005 Plumtree Odyssey “Booth of Pain” coding competition was a mashup between Hypergraph, Google Maps, del.icio.us and Plumtree User Profiling.)

Imagine my surprise when Peter described how you can mash up Google “Gadgets” and other resources available via URLs using Adrenaline, a “new” technology from the WLP team based on, of all things, iframes. It was like entering a worm hole and being transported back to 1998. (I was single again, I had no kids, I was thinner and I had more hair on my head . . . and less on my back.) But the weird thing about this parallel universe is that BEA engineers were telling me that iframes were a great way to mashup enterprise web content and that intranets all over the world could benefit from this revolutionary concept. Intranets? You mean the things that everybody replaced with portals in the last millennium? Iframes? I must have been dreaming . . . .

When I finally came back to my senses, a few things occurred to me.

First of all, it’s 2007. Portals are a thing of the past. For some of us, that will be a hard pill to swallow. But let’s face it, innovators have moved on to blogging, wikis, tagging/folksonomies and lots of other nice web 2.0 sites that all have rounded corners. The bleeding edge folks have decided that many is smarter than any. The rest of the world will catch up soon.

Secondly, if you are still building a portal or composite application of any flavor, iframes are not a viable solution. They fall short in the following ways:

Portal-to-Portlet Communication

Say you want to send information (like the name of the current user) down to a portlet running in an iframe. Hmmm, the request for an iframe comes from the browser, not from the portal. So, if anything needs to be passed into the iframe, I guess you have to put in in the URL in the request for the iframe. That’s great, but that URL is now visible in the page’s source. So a simple, “Hello [your name]” portlet where the portlet gets the name from the portal is doable. But what about passing a password? That information would need to go first to the browser and then back to the remote tier, which, from a security standpoint, is a complete showstopper.

Security

Let’s talk a little more about security. Since you’re using an iframe, the requests aren’t proxied by the portal. Instead, a page of HTML gets sent from the portal to the browser and then the browser turns around and makes requests to all the iframes on that page. Since the portal isn’t serving as a proxy, it can’t control what you do and don’t have rights to see, so security is completely thrown out of the window. (Or should I say, thrown out of the iframe?) Moreover, in an enterprise deployment, the portal usually sits in the DMZ and proxies requests out to bits and pieces of internal systems in order to surface them for extranet users. If you’re using iframes, every bit of content needs to be visible from an end user’s browser. So what’s to stop an end-user from scraping the URL out of a portal page and hitting a portlet directly? Nothing! (If I understand what I’m reading correctly, the WLP team is calling this a feature. I would call it a severe security risk.)

Scalability/Performance

Yes, this approach will work for Google Gadgets. But Google has more money than pretty much everyone. They can afford to spend frivolously on anything, including hardware. However, the rest of the world actually cares about the kind of load you put on a system when you create a “mashup.” A page consisting of five iframes is like five users hitting the sites with five separate requests, separate sessions and separate little “browsers.” If any of the iframes forces a full-page refresh or if the user does the unthinkable and say, moves to another page, every request is reissued and the mashup content is regenerated. This simply does not scale beyond a few users, unless you have as much money and as much hardware as Google does.

Caching

A properly designed portal or content aggregation engine will only issue requests to portlets when necessary. In other words, each remote portlet will only get a request if it needs to be loaded because the portal doesn’t have a cached entry. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with iframes because the portal doesn’t even know they exist. (Remember, all requests for iframe content go directly from the browser to the remote content, bypassing the portal entirely.)

What baffles me is why a company would acquire another company with a revolutionary technology (the PPE) and then start from ground zero and build a technology that does the same thing but without a portal-to-portlet communication model (preferences), security, scalability or caching. If consumers weren’t already confused, now they most certainly are.

As technologists, I hope you can see through the hype about Adrenaline and consider a product that actually allows you to mash up web content in a scalable and secure way and has been doing so since 1999. It’s called AquaLogic Interaction and it’s sold by a company we all know and love called BEA.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • I just discovered that the BID/AquaLogic (formerly Plumtree, Fuego, Flashline, etc.) folks are having another webinar, entitled “Harnessing Enterprise Mash-ups with Security and Control.” This webinar (I hope) will show:
    1. how ALI has been handling mashups since before mashups was even a buzzword and
    2. how Project Runner enables next generation mashups that allow you to invoke back-end applications and provision security, branding, SSO, etc. without actually funneling everything through the portal.

    If you were at today’s webinar and you’re now wondering how to do mashups with more robustness and security, then I hope you’ll attend this webinar. By all means, it’s just the responsible thing to do in order to offer customers different integration options when creating their mashups.

    Posted by: bucchere on January 10, 2007 at 7:31 PM

  • I’d like to add a couple points of clarity from BID product management. First of all, we’re happy to have passionate developers, but I fear this post may give the wrong impression about some of BEA’s technology and plans.

    WLP Adrenaline, ALUI, and project Runner are all complementary technologies that have a very exciting future when applied to problems such as Enterprise Mashups. You’ll be hearing more about them from BEA over the coming months through various venues, including Webinars targeted at WLP-specific use cases (such as Peter’s excellent talk) and ALUI use cases (including tomorrow’s Runner Webinar). There will also be the usual blogging and other activities.

    Just as WLP and ALUI product teams are aligned, these different technologies are aligned. Adrenaline offers WLP customers a way to extend their reach in fundamentally new ways, and Peter will expound on some technical subtleties to address some of Chris’ concerns. Runner, too, is very exciting, enabling a completely different set of use cases. As the details unfold we’ll demonstrate how well aligned these technologies are — just wait until you see them working together!

    – David Meyer

    Posted by: dmeyer on January 10, 2007 at 10:41 PM

  • Just for those that don’t know about Adrenaline, here’s an article introducing Adrenaline.

    Posted by: jonmountjoy on January 11, 2007 at 12:19 PM

  • Chris,

    As David writes, BEA is moving ahead with multiple approaches to address the enterprise mashup space. My webinar covered the approach WLP is taking, and in no way implied that ALUI is not also a viable player in this space. We offer our customers a choice of products, and different products make sense to different customers.

    As for the specific issues you raised:

    ** Technical Reply

    Good technical points, but I think you overemphasized the role of iframes within WLP. Let me cover the two places we showed the use of iframes:

    Use Case 1: injecting a portlet into a legacy webapp

    Demo: An iframe was used in the demo to inject a portlet into a legacy static html page with almost no modification to that page (one line change).

    WLP does support an alternative approach – an Ajax streamed portlet. I simply did not have time to demo it. Also, this is not a portal use case for including external non-portal content into a Portal; instead it is the inverse, which is to publish existing portal content into legacy web applications . It was intended to show a very inexpensive way to energize a dated application until it is rationalized into a portal. The focus here is on minimizing cost of supporting legacy, while building portlets in transit to a portal solution.

    Use Case 2: WLP as a Mashup composition framework

    Demo: Iframes were used to pull in non-WSRP capable components (e.g. Google Gadgets) onto a WLP page

    First, as background info, the WLP architecture supports the rendering of various types of portlets:

    • Local portlets (deployed within the webapp, JSF, JPF, etc)
    • WSRP portlets – an advanced remoting approach which handles security, inter-portlet communication, etc…
    • Iframe portlets – an available remoting approach
    • WLP partners with Kapow for remote clipped portlets (similar to the ALUI approach)

    In regards to this use case, you brought up specific concerns:

    Security

    Concerns about shared authentication were noted in my talk. If components come from outside the enterprise, there is no easy solution to that problem, regardless of what product you are using. However, I spoke of a couple approaches in the webinar, including SAML.

    If those components come from inside the enterprise, the security hacks you were referring to are generally not necessary. Our customers that expect SSO have a web SSO solution (typically, cookie powered, not password in the URL powered) in place within the enterprise.

    Caching/Performance

    The most serious concerns of yours appear to be performance related. Specifically, the concern is that a full page refresh of a page that contains N number of iframes will cause an N+1 number of requests. To expand on your concern, I will add that this is not only seen in pages with iframes, but also pages that use Ajax to pull in data. I would say that there are several reasons why this does not invalidate WLP’s approaches:

    1. Mashup pages with lots of iframe portlets approach

    Google Personalized Home Page makes use of iframes to implement their mashup framework. Many of the Gadgets on the page are rendered with an iframe. But you are mistaken in saying that this scales because Google is throwing tons of hardware at the problem. The iframe Gadgets rendered in GPHP are rendered not by Google, but by 3rd party gadget hosting servers around the world. Google does NOT have to process those iframe Gadget requests, it is a distributed approach. Likewise, you could create a WLP page where most of the portlets are iframe portlets that hit a distributed set of servers, if that makes sense. Or…

    2. Mashup pages with a mixture of portlets

    The 2nd demo in my webinar wasn’t showing a page with all iframe portlets. Rather, what the demo was showing was a WLP page with a couple of iframe portlets mixed in with local portlets. As shown above, WLP supports a number of portlet types, and a good approach is to build pages that are a mixture of that set.

    3. Ajax helps minimize page refreshes

    Your concern about iframe performance stems from the case in which the entire page refreshes. With the usage of Ajax becoming common, plus with WLP 9.2 built in support for auto-generating Ajax portlets, this impact can be minimized. Page refreshes are becoming more rare. With WLP 10.0, which releases in a few months, the Ajax support has been expanded to support Ajax based portal page changes, further reducing the liklihood of a page refresh.

    4. The “Bleeding Edge” guys are also using browser based mashup approaches

    You referred to the “Bleeding Edge” technologists in your blog as the people that are doing things correctly. What are they doing? Some of the time, those guys are doing browser based Mashups. They often use a combination of iframes and Ajax from the browser to implement their mashups. So the same approach that you dislike is already in common use across the web.

    ** Market Reply

    You state “Portals are a thing of the past”. An interesting opinion, but just that. IT cannot afford web sprawl, and so a framework for rationalization will always be in demand whether you call it a Portal or something new.

    New technologies continue to provide alternatives to existing methodologies and portals are no different. However, one thing that has distinguished portal frameworks is their ability to embrace new technologies. Struts, WSRP, JSF are all examples of this as are the Web 2.0 constructs like mashups and rich interfaces based on Ajax. This is all good news as the enterprise has a wealth of options to choose from.

    Posted by: plaird on January 11, 2007 at 2:56 PM

  • I must say, as a customer and developer, it’s great plumtree (I mean BEA, or is it Oracle) management allows you guys to express your own opinions. It so happens I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get JBoss Seam (and Ice Faces) to work with Aqualogic 6.1. I’ve been looking at the IFrame route, because the gateway stuff just isn’t working (it doesn’t properly rewrite the URLs for the Ajax stuff). I’ve come to hate the gateway. I bet it was a great idea before Ajax, but now it seems like almost every web 2.0 application is incompatible (needs major modification to get it to work). Or maybe I just don’t understand how to get it to work. Is there any good documentation on it? I’m hoping for some major improvements when 6.5 comes out though.

    Posted by: cmann50 on April 4, 2008 at 2:28 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

The Ruby IDK

It’s here: The little integration kit that could change the world. Thanks to the efforts of hotshot bdg developer Andrew Bays, the Ruby IDK is now rockin’ on BEA’s dev2dev CodeShare. Visit the project at https://rubyidk.projects.dev2dev.bea.com and start a discussion thread if you like.

Like all the best things in life, the Ruby IDK is free. It comes as a Rails project, so just unzip it and type ruby script/server and off you go developing Ruby/Rails portlets to your heart’s content. Enjoy!

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Announcing the Ruby IDK

Check it out at https://rubyidk.projects.dev2dev.bea.com.

Let’s have a virtual round of applause for Andrew Bays, bdg’s hotshot developer responsible for the latest innovation to come from our open source factory, the Ruby IDK.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • It’s a little unclear from this, and from the project description, just what the Ruby IDK is – unless of course you know what “all methods in com.plumtree.remote.portlet.*” are. Can you blog a few examples of what you can do with this?

    Posted by: jonmountjoy on October 13, 2006 at 2:15 AM

  • Here are a few examples of how one might use the Ruby IDK for portlet development. These snippets are utilized in your Ruby on Rails server’s View files (.rhtml files). The instance variables that they employ are declared and instantiated in your Application Controller(s).
    <!-- This example sets the portlet's title bar -->
    <% @portletResponse.setTitle("My Awesome Portlet") %>
    
    <!-- This example greets the user -->
    Hello, <%= @portletUser.getUserName() %>!
    
    <!-- This example redirects the browser to the portal home page -->
    <% @portletResponse.returnToPortal() %>
    
    <!-- This example creates a link back to the portal home page -->
    <a href=">%= @portletRequest.getReturnURI() %>">%= @portletRequest.getReturnURI() %>"</a>
    
    !-- This example shows how to force a portlet displayed outside of a portal page to use the ALUI header and footer -->
    <% @portletResponse.setHostedDisplayMode(HostedDisplayMode.Hosted) %>
    

    I hope you find this useful and at least somewhat informative. I would stress that you examine the sample portlets provided in CodeShare’s rubyidk.zip for a more thorough presentation of the IDK’s potential.

    Regards,
    Andrew Bays | bdg | 607 316 3090
    [email protected] | http://www.bdg-online.com

    Posted by: andrew.bays on October 20, 2006 at 11:50 AM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Washington DC Area ALUI (Plumtree) Training

bdg plans to offer a 5-day AquaLogic (Plumtree) Training Course in the Washington DC Metro Area starting on October 16th. We’re combining our two most popular courses into one jam-packed week. The first three days will cover Plumtree Administration followed by two days of Portlet Development with the IDK. The course will be given in Herndon, VA about 10 minutes from Dulles Airport. All course materials have been updated for the G6 version of ALUI.

If you’re interested, you may download the complete syllabi from our web site.

There are no pre-requisites for the Plumtree Administration course other than a basic understanding of Web applications. The Portlet Development course requires strong programming skills in either Java or .NET including Web programming concepts such as posting forms, retrieving parameters from the querystring and working with basic Javascript for form validation.

The price for this course is $500/day. You may attend the 3-day segment, the 2-day segment or the entire week.

There is a limit of 10 participants. You must sign up by Friday, October 6th and bdg must receive payment by Friday, October 13th. We now accept VISA/MC payments in addition to corporate checks and money orders.

To sign up, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. If you have any questions, please send us an e-mail or call us at 703 234 7910.