WebLogic Workshop Application Development Basics - Portals
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Page Flows and controls, collectively known as Web applications, are the core content of a Web site. Portals are the mechanism through which content is put together and displayed to the user. As today's Web applications become increasingly more sophisticated, applications requiring -specialized sales campaigns, a customized look and feel, personalized services, and similar features are becoming more important.
WebLogic Platform 8.1 includes WebLogic Portal 8.1, which offers the following features:
Portals—Configurable desktop interfaces to application functionality. Portals enable you to define sophisticated look and feel, all packaged within a Portal Desktop.
Portlets—Individual pieces of functionality, based on HTML, Page Flows, Web services, and other areas, that can be reused with a Portal Desktop.
Books—Tabular definitions of collections of pages, used to group portlets into cohesive units.
Look and feel—A fully customizable engine for defining the look (styles, fonts, images, and so forth) and feel (rendering and behavior) of applications.
Custom content management—This feature includes services for logging in, defining user profiles, displaying profile-specific content, running specialized sales campaigns, and tailoring content based on individual user characteristics.
Figure 6 shows a simple portal application with a custom header. Chapters 12, "Overview of Portal Applications," and 13, "Personalization of Portal Applications," detail how to create Portal-enabled applications and take advantage of portal services.
Figure 6 - A simple portal application with a custom header.
Web Services and Business Process Integration
Many applications require integrated services. For all practical purposes, integration is the process of making various applications and systems work together seamlessly. Common integration tasks include
Creating business processes
Modeling complex, long-lived transactions
Converting data between formats
Implementing multiparty orchestrated messaging
Accessing data and logic in external systems
In support of integration, WebLogic Platform 8.1 includes WebLogic Integration (WLI) 8.1. WLI 8.1 includes a process management engine and tools for creating business processes, tools for administration, tools for creating and managing business processes that require human interaction (commonly referred to as worklists), an XQuery-based transformation engine, and various messaging services. Chapter 11, "Working with Workflows," goes into detail about how to use and build business process definitions.
WebLogic Workshop offers support for a full-featured Web services development environment, including accessing external Web services and creating new Web services. With WebLogic Workshop, you can create a control for accessing a remote service in minutes rather than hours. Figure 7 shows the Web Services Control Wizard dialog boxes for creating a Web service from the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file published by a third party. All you need is access to the WSDL file, and Workshop can create controls to access both Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and document-style Web services. Chapter 9, "Working with Web Services," goes into depth about working with and building Web services and Web services controls.
Figure 7 - The Web Services Control Wizard dialog boxes.
Now you've seen a high-level view of a WebLogic Workshop application. In the following sections we'll look at it more closely.
 This chapter is from BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1, by Albert J. Saganich, Jr., et al. (Apress, 2004, ISBN: 0-672-32622-1). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
Buy this book now.
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