Today, I attended an exlusive Tech Session at Oracle Netherland HQ in my lovely home village De meern near Utrecht. The tech session was an introduction to Oracle new born star: Oracle Webcenter. The session was given by Rahul Patel, product manager of Oracle Webcenter.
Oracle webcenter is an integrated suite of products, mainly based on common standards, to create user work environments that tend to take advantage of SOA and tend to enable business users to bring complete context to their daily work task. Webcenter is JSF based, because according to Oracle JSF enables component-based development which is the central architectural foundation of Oracle Webcenter. With webcenter the gap between your Portal and applications is vanished compared to Oracle Portal. The reason for this is that Webcenter is a single architecture with a single web UI. This means that your portal is just a JSF page containig portlets (WSRP 1.1/1.2 or JSR-168 compliant) mixed with you own JSF components or even XHTML markup. Patel showed us how easy it is to contruct a webcenter page in the today released JDeveloper 10.1.3.2. He only uses his mouse to drag and drop a Webcenter JSF page together that contains a WSRP Adobe portlet (implemented in Flash) for searching and displaying mobile phones. Webcenter does not restricts you to use only WSRP or JSR-168 compliant portlets inside your page, but you can also use content from other systems, like CRM-systems, using JSR-170 compliant content-repository services.
Because I have a lot of user experience with the integration of Struts applications in Oracle Portal and in developing UIs for SOA architectures using BPEL as the service orchestrator, two features caught my attention during the presentation:
JSF-portlet bridge
Webcenter enables you to integrate a complete standalone JSF application as a portlet in a webcenter page using the JSF-portlet bridge. Ok that’s nice..but how about AJAX and redirects for overcoming double-submit problems? Does this work well, because this doesn’t work with the Struts JPDK in Oracle Portal? Patel told us that both aspects will work with the JSF-portlet bridge..:-)
Weaving portlets together with Oracle BPEL
Patel tolds us that you can use BPEL to weave different portlets together to create a business flow, because you can integrate the bpel webservices and task services. For example, an employee registration can involve different human interactions with several systems. You can build each human interaction step as a portlet and weave them together in a business process using Oracle BPEL. This sounds nice and productive, however, I do not have find a concrete example on OTN yet…
Webcenter contains many more nice features, like out-of-the box messaging and embedded wiki. Too much for this posting so please look here to find out more
At the end of the session the question came what the future of Portal will be. Patel emphasises that Webcenter is not Portal 2.0, but it just standing parallel to it. He also mentioned that Portal still has an development roadmap for release 11. I do not have a clear opinion about this issue, because I simply do not know Webcenter too well yet. I only can say that I was really impressed by the things Patel told and showed us in the session. Now, I have to practice for my own to see if Webcenter is really Oracle’s new born star.
