BEA Released WebLogic Portal® 9.2

BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 provides enterprise portal infrastructure for streamlined portal development. This framework includes a rich, graphical environment for developing portals as well as browser-based assembly tools for business experts. WebLogic Portal simplifies the production and management of custom-fit portals, allowing you to leverage a shared services environment to roll out changes with minimal complexity and effort.

• Market-leading support for standards-based federated portals.
• New community framework simplifies portal membership, management, and end-user production.
• New tools for portal lifecycle management simplify production operations for Admins.
• BEA Workshop for WebLogic supports Eclipse, Apache Beehive, and Java Server Faces for unified development of Java, portal, Web, and service-oriented applications.
• New support for Ajax-based portlets adds richness to portal interactions.
• Includes a new release of BEA WebLogic Server that supports blended development and delivers improved performance and simplified development and monitoring tools to prevent issues before they occur.

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.