New Federation Features in WebLogic Portal 9.2

by Alex Toussaint
06/29/2006

Abstract

A services-oriented architecture approach to building applications improves productivity, agility, and speed for both business and IT. To help achieve these benefits, BEA WebLogic Portal supports industry-standard technology for publishing and consuming portlets that incorporate user interaction with the service functional logic. The portal federation capabilities of WebLogic Portal based on Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) technology enables a fabric of distributed enterprise portal services that can be combined easily to enable the business to respond quickly and deliver optimal user experiences for portal audiences.

WebLogic Portal 9.2 expands portal federation capabilities first introduced in WebLogic Portal 8.1. This article will focus on these new federation features. In addition, WebLogic Portal 9.2 brings a new community framework added to portal business services, and simplifies portal membership, management, and end-user production of portals for audiences with common interests. Portal lifecycle management has been simplified in WebLogic Portal 9.2 with improved production operations for administrators and for developers.

Federated Portals

Simply put, a federated portal is a portal that includes remotely distributed resources. Portlets built to conform to WSRP provide this remote capability. These remote resources, coming from one or many portal servers known as producers, are collected and assembled together at runtime in a portal application called a consumer, which presents the federated portal view to users. For additional background information on WSRP and WebLogic Portal see Using Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) with WebLogic Portal 8.1 (Dev2Dev, November 2004).

Remote portlets can be added to the consumer portal to create new applications. Figure 1 illustrate this concept. Developers work with remote resources using the WebLogic Workshop IDE. Administrators use the WebLogic Portal Administration Web-based tool to assemble and manage federated portals.

Figure 1. Portlets are displayed in the consumer portal providing a seamless portal view.

WebLogic Portal implements WSRP, which enables assembly of remote resources into new portal applications during runtime. WSRP is the cornerstone technology behind federated portals.

Federated portals have the following characteristics:

• Distributed: Portlets are deployed on remote systems across the enterprise.
• Decoupled: The portal and its portlets do not depend on each other. Remote portlets can be maintained and deployed separately from the federated portal.
• Integrated: Remote portlets can communicate and share data.
• Standards-based: WebLogic Portal federated portals are built on open standards such as WSRP, SOAP, WSDL, SAML, and UDDI.

Benefits of Federation

Federation provides several benefits. Here are some of the most common:

• Plug-and-play SOA: A federated portal is a true example of a plug-and-play Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In most cases, a portal administrator can locate a remote portlet and incorporate it into a portal without enlisting the help of a developer. These "presentation services" are composed of portlets from one or many producers and can be reused by multiple consumers providing a "many-to-many" relationship between consumers and producers.
• Portal deployment cost reduction: Perhaps the most significant benefit of portal federation is that consumer federated portals do not have to be redeployed when their remote portlets are updated. Remote portlets are deployed in separate Web applications, typically on remote systems called producers. When a portlet is changed, such as by adding or removing a feature or fixing a bug, the remote portlets that reference it automatically reflect the change. The consumer portal application does not have to be redeployed.
• Increased release schedule flexibility: Because the portlets and other services in federated portals are distributed, multiple teams can work on and deploy new features independently of each other. Through the mechanism of Web services, developers of federated portals consume only the software resources produced by these independent development teams.
• Portal testing cost reduction: Portal administrators can incorporate new remote portlets into a portal by locating a producer and picking the desired portlets. From the administrator's standpoint, these remote portlets are fully tested and ready for use. Developers can test remote portlets independently, thereby reducing test complexity.
• Decreased dependency among software components: When a portlet relies on specific software libraries a dependency is introduced that must be managed. Changes to either the portlet or the library version can create incompatibilities with existing code. Because remote portlets are developed, tested, deployed, and run on remote systems, a federated portal that uses remote portlets is isolated from such dependencies.
• Increased reuse of portal components: A portlet that is published by a producer can be reused by any number of consumers with minimal work and no additional coding.
• Increased interoperability: By definition, federated portals are loosely coupled and standards-based, making it possible for WebLogic Portal to consume portlets from third-party vendors. Likewise, it is possible for third-party portals to consume portlets hosted in WebLogic portals.

WebLogic Portal 9.2: New Features

Now I'll examine the new features in WebLogic Portal 9.2. The topics covered include: federated books and pages, portlet registry, user profile propagation, consumer entitlements, federation interceptors, and federation tools.

Federated books and pages

Since WebLogic Portal 8.1 added support for WSRP 1.0 in 2003, there has been an increase in implementation of SOA projects and the need for customers to expose and consume more software resources as services.

Customers want to be able to assemble new composite applications and have seamless integration take place, and this requires a flexible service infrastructure. As the number of remote portlets has expanded so has the demand for better management constructs as well as ways to provide affinity between components so that loose coupling is preserved. Figure 2 illustrates the logical view.

Figure 2. Portlets, pages, and books can be exposed as WSRP resources.

WebLogic Portal 9.2 enables developers to federate groups of portlets contained in either a page or a set of pages that make up a book. Several portlets can be federated at once as opposed to one by one. Administration has been simplified so that many portlets can be managed as a group via pages and books. Administrators no longer need to understand which portlets go together; portlet affinity can be defined and federated at a page level.