Oracle WebCenter Services Sample Portlets

Date: March, 2009

Table of Contents

Introduction 

Software Prerequisites

The sample portlets require the following:

They also require one of the following portlet containers:

If you do not have the above software available, please visit the Oracle WebCenter Suite Home Page to obtain it.

Knowledge Prerequisites

The sample portlets will be deployed and configured on the selected portlet container. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with these processes on the selected container; if not please consult the product-specific documentation.

Technologies used by these samples include Java Portlets (JSR 168), JSP 2.0, JSTL, Web services, CSS, and JavaScript. For more information on these technologies, please refer to the Additional References.

Application Overview

Oracle WebCenter Services is an integrated set of products designed for creating dynamic, highly productive user work environments that take advantage of SOA and enable business users to bring complete context to their daily work tasks. WebCenter Services includes a complete set of Web 2.0 content, search, collaboration, and communication services that can be embedded directly into applications built with the WebCenter Framework and existing Oracle Portal, Oracle WebLogic Portal, and Oracle WebCenter Interaction deployments. In addition, these services can be deployed into custom applicatons.

Sample Portlets 

For more detailed information on the sample portlets, please see the following:

Installation

Installation of the sample portlets will vary somewhat depending on the portlet container being used. Please consult the relevant documentation for the portlet container for more specific instructions, some of which may be found in the Additional References.

For many portlet containers the Java Web Archive (WAR) file may be deployed directly using various development and administration tools and utilities. If you are planning on exploring and modifying the sample code you should deploy this as an "exploded" archive on the file system. This may be done via an import utility, as in an IDE, or via a standard JAR or Zip utility.

When using the portlets via Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), please consult the product-specific instructions for creating the consumer and/or producers for the portlets. The portlets have been designed and tested with WSRP in mind, but there may be additional configuration and/or modifications to the code necessary depending on the way the server is configured.

The sample portlet does not provide container-specific security hooks and uses a simple user name based system for accessing the remote services. It assumes that the user exists on both the local and remote systems, and that the authentication is handled by the portal container. Additional security via common security realms, SSO, credential vaults, and the like will require configuration and possible code modifications.

Quickstart Instructions

Simplified instructions are available for the following:

Rich Text Editor

The portlets work best when a rich text editor (RTE) is available. They were designed to use the FCKeditor, if it is present. If not a simple text area is provided, although with a diminished user experience. This editor may be obtained from the FCKeditor - Download page.

The archives contain a top level fckeditor directory which should be placed in the root of the web application. The portlet samples assume this editor and location by default. If this location is not used, or if a different RTE is to be used, the portlet sample code must be modified.

For additional information on the FCKeditor, please visit the following:

Configuration

Once the portlets have been deployed on the server they must be added to a portal, page, etc. to be used. The portlets have been designed to be usable by an anonymous (non-authenticated) user, although any customizations made will only be available for the life of the session. When the user authenticates the portlet state will be stored in the portlet preferences, with little need for further manual configuration.

The portlets have been designed to be "bootstrapped" when initially accessed by the user. They will display the configuration screen, allowing the user to enter or select from a list of available options. For configuration details of each portlet please refer to the following links:

Additional References