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Technical Overview
An Oracle White Paper
August 2005
Oracle Portal 10g Release 2
Technical Overview
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3
Wizard-Driven Page Design and Development ........................................... 3
Creating and editing pages........................................................................... 3
Organizing and managing pages................................................................. 4
Customizing pages and Portlets.................................................................. 4
Passing page parameters and events .......................................................... 4
Self-Service Content Publishing, Management, and Access ....................... 5
Publishing content ........................................................................................ 5
Content Item Types...................................................................................... 5
Extending Content Attributes & behavior................................................ 6
Content Management API’s........................................................................ 6
Classifying and managing content .............................................................. 6
Navigating and accessing content............................................................... 7
Routing content for review and approval ................................................. 7
Subscribing to content and pages............................................................... 7
Integrating with the desktop ....................................................................... 7
Collaboration ................................................................................................. 8
Portal Development Tools and Services........................................................ 8
Standards and Platforms .............................................................................. 9
Rich Portlet Development Environment................................................ 13
Partners and Community........................................................................... 16
Application Integration.............................................................................. 17
Deployment Support ...................................................................................... 19
Grid Computing and Oracle’s Grid Computing Offering.................... 19
Oracle Application Server 10g and Its Benefits...................................... 20
Performance and Architecture.................................................................. 21
Security ......................................................................................................... 23
Hosting ......................................................................................................... 24
Portal Management..................................................................................... 25
Integration.................................................................................................... 31
Conclusion........................................................................................................ 32
INTRODUCTION
Today's enterprises are gaining competitive advantage and realizing increased
productivity by deploying an enterprise portal within their IT infrastructure.
Enterprise portals are specifically designed to be the single source of interaction
with corporate information and the focal point for conducting day-to-day business.
The Oracle Application Server includes a complete and integrated solution for
building, deploying, and maintaining a world-class enterprise portal.
Oracle Portal combines a rich, declarative environment for creating a portal Web
interface, publishing and managing information, accessing dynamic data, and
customizing the portal experience with an extensible framework for any Web-based
technology, such as J2EE-based application access and Web Services. Using Oracle
Portal, e-businesses have the power to connect employees, partners, and customers
with the information they need, as well as the flexibility to create views tailored to
each community.
This document covers the major technical features and services that have been
implemented in Oracle Application Server Portal 10g (9.0.4) and Oracle Portal 10g
Release 2 (10.1.2).
Publishing content
A simple wizard guides a publisher through the steps of defining content, adding
attributes, and publishing to a page. No knowledge of HTML is required. Virtually
any type of content can be published, including files, simple text, hypertext links,
and server-side scripting. Page and page region properties set by the page designer
automatically format and display the content on the page with the proper color,
font, location, alignment, and so on. The pages themselves are organized within a
page group, which can be used to create ad hoc or carefully controlled content
taxonomies.
All major portal vendors today display snippets of information in discrete amounts
on their pages. The standard term for referring to these areas of data on the Portal
page is “portlet,” and in this matter Oracle Portal has always been one of the
leaders.
Portlet Providers
Portlets
Oracle is offering a hosted Portal verification service. This service allows vendors
building WSRP producers to test that their implementations run in Oracle's
environment. It provides an environment for registering your WSRP producer and
adding its portlets to a Portal page. The service also contains an Oracle WSRP
producer containing sample portlets implemented using Oracle's standards based
Portal Developer Kit. This PDK allows you to build and deploy JSR 168 portlets in
a remote environment based on WSRP.
This service is available at http://portalstandards.oracle.com.
The Oracle Application Server provides the most complete J2EE implementation
in the application server market. Any J2EE feature can be used to declaratively
construct portlets, including JSP’s, servlets, EJB, JCA, Java Struts, JAAS and others.
Organizations that have existing Web interfaces built with HTML or Java Server
Pages (JSP), or who prefer to develop and maintain their code using industry
standard Java, can access portlets and even build entire Portal pages using the JSP
model. Portal developers using JSP’s can make full use of the portal infrastructure
for functionality such as Single Sign-On and object access privileges.
There are two ways to use a JSP to include portlet instances, one is as a JSP held
external to the Oracle Application Server Metadata Repository, and the other is as a
JSP managed inside the OracleAS Metadata Repository. In either case, the JSP may
have either been built entirely external to Oracle Portal or may have been exported
from an existing Portal page definition and subsequently edited.
For those developers who want to use their own Java editors to build their Portal
Pages, Oracle Portal provides a tag library of hooks needed to access portlets in the
portal and to use the portal infrastructure such as object privileges. As a developer
you therefore have complete control over the layout and behavior of the Portal
page.
Developers may also generate a JSP file from an existing Portal page that they can
edit using their own Java editors. The first step is to copy a Portal page to a JSP,
which causes a JSP generator to traverse through the page for the user interface and
metadata elements and generate a file with the appropriate JSP tags. The metadata
elements of the page are represented in an XML structure and include the details of
externally published portlets, page parameters, portlet parameters, events, and so
forth. The user interface elements of the page are represented via a URL referring
to the CSS used in the portlets.
To enable this functionality you do the following:
• Enable JSP access to a page group
<portal:usePortal pagegroup="MyPageGroup"/>
<portal:showPortlet name="StockQuote">
<portal:parameter name="ticker" value="ORCL"/>
</portal:showPortlet>
Notice that the usePortal tag names a page group but not a portal. In this case, a
default portal parameter is being read from the wwjps.xml configuration file. You
must configure this file to run external JSPs that access portal content.
You may also load the JSP file created using the above methods into Oracle Portal
and create an internally managed Portal page based on the JSP. To do this, you
specify either the JSP or JAR or WAR file and indicate the initial JSP (a WAR file
may contain multiple JSPs). Once the file is created, you can set security, enable
caching, and add parameters.
Open Internet standards, such as HTTP, XML and SOAP, are built into Oracle
Portal's architecture and utilized for exchanging data among Portal instances and
remote applications. Standards-based applications and services (including Web
Services) are easily incorporated into the Portal environment using the framework
in the Oracle Portal Developer Kit (PDK).
At the heart of the Oracle HTTP server component is the Apache Web server, the
world's most popular Internet Web server.
Besides standard Web browsers, you can access Oracle Portal pages from wireless
clients. Working in conjunction with Oracle Application Server Wireless, the Portal
automatically transforms the Portal page structure to a form appropriate for the
smaller screen devices common for wireless clients. Portlets on this page are
limited to those that are additionally capable of generating Oracle's MobileXML
For fine-grained control of the page structure displayed on mobile clients, Oracle
Portal provides a complimentary set of page design tools oriented towards the
wireless (small device) experience. Thus, you can build a distinct portal structure
for wireless users. Portlet instances can be shared between a mobile portal and its
standard desktop counterpart allowing you to present a common set of portlets
whose customizations are identical. This provides a more natural feel as a user who
customizes a portlet in their standard portal will see the effect in the portlet in the
mobile portal.
OmniPortlet
Web Clipping
The Web Clipping Portlet assists with extracting specific portions or "clippings"
(for example, data in an HTML table) of Web page content; the page developer can
browse to the desired Web page, deconstruct the page into "clippings” and preview
the selected clipping in the portlet itself.
Using the Oracle PDK, developers can build custom portlets that interact with
customer-specific content or applications. At a high level the Oracle PDK offers
several feature sets including the ability to incorporate off-the-shelf Web Services,
additional J2EE services and any Web-accessible content. In addition developers
may also implement portlets as extensions of their existing Web development
environment using Java technologies (servlets, Java Server Pages), CGI
technologies (C, C++, etc.), scripting languages (Perl, PHP), Active Server Pages,
or as stored procedures (PL/SQL or Java). The Oracle PDK provides a gentle
slope that allows developers to quickly integrate their existing applications and
gradually add portal functionality. This minimizes the upfront investment required
to build portlets and allows developers to better reuse existing components.
Portlet providers may enforce security on their portlet by leveraging the single sign-
on features within the portlet architecture. In addition, developers can take
advantage of a set of API-level services in their provider and portlet code. The
services are provided as a convenience to the developer, and their use is optional.
For more information on the Oracle PDK, visit http://portalcenter.oracle.com/.
Customizing Portlets
Per user and per instance-level portlet personalization offer significant productivity
gains to both the Portal developer and the Portal user. After a developer creates a
portlet definition with a default display, a page designer can customize that
definition to meet the needs of a particular community. Individual users within that
Portlet components are easily managed through the use of an integrated navigator
tool that allows developers to access, perform actions on (browsing, granting
privileges, exporting and deleting), and keep track of related components and
database objects.
Already an OPN Member? Have your OPN Administrator declare your interest in
Oracle Application Server. If you are an Oracle partner, declare your interest now
in the Application Server Product Focus by contacting your company’s OPN
Primary Administrator to ensure the Application Server Product Focus is selected
in your profile.
Oracle Portal Developer Services on OTN provides the Portal developer with all of
the latest technology and content related to Oracle Portal, making it the quickest
way for developers to build and test portals and portlets.
By subscribing to Oracle Portal Developer Services, you can access a number of
services and resources available exclusively to the Portal developer community. Not
only is it possible to access the development team within Oracle, but also to tap
into the greater community of Portal developers who have developed expertise in
working with portlets. Subscribers can also publish their own Portal development
knowledge and experience.
Subscribers to Portal Developer Services can:
• Build portlets using the Oracle Portal Developer Kit (PDK). As a
subscriber, you can download pre-release versions of the Oracle PDK.
You also get exclusive access to the latest how-to articles and development
tools to help you build your own portlets.
• Register and test portlets on Oracle Portal Verification Service. You can
host and test your own portlets on the Oracle Portal Verification Service
without having to install and manage your own Portal instance.
• Exchange knowledge with fellow community subscribers. Take advantage
of all that the Oracle Portal community has to offer. As a subscriber, you
can share Portal development knowledge with fellow community
subscribers. Upon registration, subscribers receive a community folder on
Portal Center where they can upload portlet code and portal development
insights (up to 4 MB).
• Participate in subscriber surveys. Subscribers may participate in quick polls
and detailed surveys, published specifically to gather feedback on
important topics. In particular, there is an opportunity to rate articles,
samples, and other content based on their effectiveness.
• Receive newsletter updates. Subscribers receive an Oracle Portal
Developer newsletter that provides information on the latest content and
software related to Portal development.
Application Integration
Portal Integration (POINT) offers portlets that allow Oracle Portal users to
integrate various applications to their portal. The following portlets are released as
Pre-built portlets that enable direct access to applications data from the portal are
available as part of Oracle Applications 11i. All of these portlets are integrated to
take advantage of single sign-on as a partner application. These portlets are role
based and ship in three major categories:
• Daily Business Intelligence Portlets: Portlets included with the Daily
Business Intelligence product family.
• End-User Portlets: Portlets that are useful for Oracle E-Business Suite
Release 11i end-users. Portlets in this category may be added to default
Portal pages for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i users or made
available to users to add to their own custom pages.
• Applications System Administrator Portlets: Portlets that are primarily
useful for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i system administrators and
other non-production purposes. Portlets in this category are neither
generally useful nor appropriate for end users.
DEPLOYMENT SUPPORT
A complete Oracle Portal installation provides a deployment platform that provides
the essential underlying services that a portal needs in a pre-integrated framework.
As a fundamental service of the Oracle Application Server, Oracle Portal leverages
the key underlying grid computing capabilities it provides.
Pre-built portlets
Oracle Portal itself is fully portlet enabled. All major administration, development,
and end user functions within the portal are accessed via a portlet (see Figure 3).
Oracle Portal ships with a set of pre-built portlets installed and configured for
portal development, portal administration, and general use by portal users:
• Portlet Development—Access developer information from
http://portalcenter.oracle.com; create and manage Portal page groups and
Figure 3. Oracle Portal is pre-configured with pages and portlets for portal development and
administration
High-Availability
The Oracle Portal Metadata Repository supports the following high availability
options out-of-the-box:
• Oracle Database 10g RAC deployment
• Cold Failover Clustering - The OracleAS Metadata Repository install can
detect and install the OracleAS Metadata Repository on nodes in a
hardware cluster for cold failover. The option to install the OracleAS
Metadata Repository on the current node as if the node is not in a
hardware cluster is also available.
• Oracle Data Guard deployment
Security
Oracle Portal leverages the complete security infrastructure of Oracle Identity
Management to authenticate users, support single sign on (SSO), and manage users
and user group information.
Authenticating users
Oracle Internet Directory (OID) is Oracle Portal's repository for user and group
definitions. Users can be provisioned through user management screens in Oracle
Portal, or with the administration tools and APIs provided with OID. Third party
LDAP directories can be synchronized with OID using built-in metadirectory
capabilities.
Access control lists (ACL’s) are used throughout to manage user and group
privileges on portal objects (pages, styles, items, portlets, etc.). Administrators can
delegate ACL responsibility to object owners, who can specify the users and user
groups, as well as their privileges to access, customize, or modify the object.
Administrators can also grant global privileges on all objects of a given type.
Oracle Portal is easily configured to support communication with users and remote
portlet providers over an SSL connection.
Hosting
Oracle Portal provides hosting support as both a platform for Application Service
Providers (ASPs) and as a more manageable way for large Enterprise IT
departments to host departmental intranet or Extranet portal sites.
Traditionally, implementing a fully isolated portal environment for a company or
department has required setting up a dedicated database instance for each
organization. This can quickly prove costly in terms of both hardware and
manpower resources, especially if the number of organizations is large. A single
shared instance is obviously more manageable but typically will not provide the
level of isolation required to host multiple organizations securely.
Oracle Portal provides a more cost effective and manageable solution for hosting
multiple organizations that provides all the benefits of a shared instance model but
without compromising organization security. At the heart of our hosting solution is
the Oracle Database 10g Virtual Private Database (VPD).
The hosted portal environment enables the allocation of unique branded URLs to
the different subscribers. For example, Company A and Company B can be hosted
in the same instance. Company A accesses their portal through the URL
http://www.companyA.com/ and similarly company B uses
http://www.companyB.com/. The branded URL switches the context to the
appropriate subscriber so that users need only provide their username and
password to login. Branded URLs also provide the capability for subscribers to
include public pages and content on their portals.
Customer Provisioning
Portal Management
In Oracle Portal, there are two related management interfaces: the Oracle
Enterprise Manager Application Server Control (Application Server Control) and
the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. The Application Server Control is
installed with every instance of Oracle Application Server and provides the
management tools needed to monitor and administer a single OracleAS instance.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control is installed separately from your
Oracle AS installations. Typically, there will be only one Enterprise Manager Grid
Control installation per Enterprise. The Grid Control provides a wider view of the
network to manage multiple instances of OracleAS. In addition, the Grid Control
provides a robust feature set designed to help manage all aspects of the enterprise,
including Oracle databases, hosts, listeners, and other components. When used
together, the Application Server Control and the Grid Control provide a complete
set of efficient tools to reduce the cost and complexity of managing an enterprise.
Out of the box, the Oracle Portal Metadata Repository supports NFS installations
and Installation onto machines with either DHCP or Fixed IP address. Oracle
Portal can also be installed on a computer that is not connected to a network, and
add that computer to a network later.
When installing an Oracle Portal middle tier on a computer that already has other
middle tiers, it is possible to select to which farm the middle tier should belong.
The Repository Creation Assistant may be used to install the Oracle Portal Product
Metadata schema into a separate customer database rather than in the default
OracleAS Metadata Repository.
Port Management
If the requirement is to avoid using the default port numbers usually assigned by
the installer, you can set up a file with component names and desired port numbers
(for example, if you want access to Portal to be on HTTP port 80 and not the
default HTTP port 7777). The installer then uses the values from the file instead of
the default port numbers.
After installation, the ports in use may be viewed and/or modified via the
Application Server Control UI.
Each Oracle Portal Oracle home contains its own Application Server Control
installation. You can use the Application Server Control to manage your Oracle
Portal middle tier in the three fundamental ways of Real Time Monitoring,
Administration and Detailed Log File Diagnostics.
Administration
The previously mentioned Portal Target Page also allows you to easily access
several administration tasks, including:
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control is installed into its own, separate
Oracle home from the Oracle Portal Oracle home it is managing. In the majority of
cases the Grid Control is actually installed on a completely separate node to your
OracleAS installation. The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control installation
consists of the Management Agent, Management Service and Management
Repository.
The Management Service uploads the monitoring data it received from the
Management Agent to the Management Repository. The Management Repository
Whereas the Application Server Control displays real time metrics, the Grid
Control shows metrics that have been collected over a period of time. The range of
Oracle Portal metrics that are to be collected are configured (by default) at install
time.
You can use these collected metrics to monitor historical trends. For any of the
collected metrics, you can graph their performance over a period of time of up to
31 days. In addition you can also graph this same metric side by side with the same
metric from a different Oracle Portal installation that is also being monitored.
In the Grid Control, you can define and adjust the thresholds for Oracle Portal
metrics. Thresholds are boundary values against which monitored metric values are
compared. You can specify a warning threshold such that, when a monitored metric
value crosses that threshold, a warning alert is generated. Alerts can notify you of
impending problems that you can address in a timely manner. Alerts specific to
Oracle Portal can be viewed from the Portal Target page in the Grid Control.
Editing metric thresholds is useful because you can add or change the thresholds to
fit the monitoring needs of your organization. When defining a threshold, you
should choose a value that avoids too many unnecessary alerts.
Once you have tailored your thresholds to your organization you can set up
notification alerts to execute when certain metrics exceed the pre-set thresholds.
To set up a notification in the Grid Control you first establish at least one
Notification Method for either an Outgoing Mail Server, a Script (OS Command or
PL/SQL) or an SNMP Trap. Once you have a Notification Method defined then
you can link it to a Notification Rule through which you can choose the targets and
conditions for which you want to receive notifications in the Grid Control.
Application Modeling
In the Grid Control, you can create a Web Application to perform application
performance monitoring against Oracle Portal sites by monitoring end-user
response times or the performance of representative transactions. Using this
feature, multiple sites can be monitored separately on their own page even when
they all belong to the same Oracle Portal installation. For example,
portalcenter.oracle.com and portalcatalog.oracle.com are part of the same Oracle
Portal installation, even though they are accessed via different home pages.
Two main types of monitoring are performed on the Web Applications page:
Portal Navigation
Oracle Portal includes several features to aid users, developers, and administrators
in navigating to Portal pages, objects created within the portal, and external URLs.
The Portal navigator, and several navigation portlets assist users in finding the
objects they seek within the portal.
Portal Navigator
The navigator, accessible by default from the page banner, allows users, developers,
and administrators to quickly locate an Oracle Portal page, provider, or database
object and take action on these objects (see Figure 4). The navigator provides an
Explorer-like view of objects that are accessible to a logged-in user. The objects
that a user can access and the actions they can take are defined by user privileges.
Figure 4. The navigator provides an easy-to-use navigation model to access and take action on pages
Navigation Portlets
All text appearing in wizards, dialog boxes, messages, and help topics has been
translated into 27 languages. Users who access the portal with a browser language
setting preference see administration, editing, and all other non-user defined
features in their preferred language. In addition, Oracle Portal’s self-service
publishing features allow information owners to load multiple translations of their
content items. Users viewing these items see the translation corresponding to their
language setting.
Upgrade
Utilities are available to upgrade from Oracle9iAS Release 2 and Oracle Application
Server 10g (9.0.4) to Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2). The Oracle
Application Server Upgrade and Compatibility Guide 10g (10.1.2) describes the full
process of upgrading Oracle Portal and other Oracle Application Server
components to Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2).
Integration
The Oracle Application Server includes a complete set of services, all of which may
be deployed via the portal environment to create a complete application server
solution.
Business Intelligence
Many portal implementations require tools to create detailed analyses and reports
on enterprise data. Pre-integrated business intelligence components within Oracle
Application Server, including Oracle Application Server Discoverer, Oracle
Application Server Reports Services, and Oracle Business Intelligence Beans,
provide these capabilities and more. Advanced features within these components
support ad-hoc query, reporting, and analysis of enterprise data, and provide the
ability to publish high-quality, end-user reports in HTML, PDF, or XML.
Transactional Applications
The Oracle Application Server allows developers to develop and deploy world-class
transactional applications, both OLTP style applications as well as Self-Service style
applications. These applications may be deployed via Oracle Portal using Oracle
Application Server Forms Services and Oracle Application Server Containers for
J2EE (OC4J).
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