IBM WebSphere Portal Primer: Second Edition

Portal

Introduction

The dictionary defines a portal as a door or entrance; hence, that picture on the cover. In this book, you will learn why the word portal has become a major buzzword in the world of information technology (IT). Most of the major software vendors have a portal server product or aspire to have one. Not to be outdone, enterprises big and small are clamoring to put up portal presences on the Web.

A recent report from Forrester Research states, IT executives expect eBusiness spending to drop, but more than one-third of Global 3500 firms plan to purchase portal servers. Why do enterprise portal projects get funding while IT budgets shrink?

What Are Portals?

In IT, portals are defined as doorways into the vast Internet world. If you do not know it yet, Web sites are passé; we are already into the second generation of portals. Organizations like Yahoo, Netscape, CNN, and MSNBC have been serving up information via portals for some time. It is like a Web supermarket, where you buy or view just what you want. Portals are fast becoming gateways to the corporate world, delivering information in a way that seems tailored to each employee.

A portal lets you do four things with online information:

Organize—Portals let you organize online information for personal and competitive advantage. For example, you can set up a portal to send a message to your mobile phone when a critical stock price is reached.

Search—By organizing information, a portal enables you to quickly search through that information to find answers quickly. Portals also offer the ability to send the information you find to others.

Personalize—The biggest benefit of portals is their ability to personalize information. You can select the topics you want information on, keep track of the stocks you own, know the weather in your area, and have it presented in the format you like. This feature involves two prerequisites: The user has to log in, and the portal has to store user-profile information.

Collaborate—More and more portals are offering users the ability to communicate and collaborate with each other in real-time. E-mail started as a way to reduce paper mail. Now, we look to reduce e-mail, and collaboration plays a part in doing that. The ability to chat with people online, or share a document via e-meetings, is a powerful feature that portals can provide.

Portal Servers

Enterprises want to know how portals can be set up, what kind of expertise is required to put them into production, and how many kinds of portals exist. At the center of portal technology is a piece of software called the portal server. IBM was one of the first major software companies to market a portal server. Some are stand-alone portal servers, and others are deeply integrated with an application server. IBM’s WebSphere Portal falls into the latter category. It is integrated with the award-winning WebSphere Application Server. As part of the IBM WebSphere family, it is Java-based and J2EE compliant.

Most other major software vendors, such as Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, BEA, and SAP, have portal servers. Smaller, specialized software companies, such as Plumtree and Vignette, also market their own portal servers, but these typically run on other application servers.

Portal Types

Three different types of portals exist: business-to-business (B2B), business-to-employee (B2E), and business-to-consumer (B2C). These can encompass the Internet, an intranet, and/or an extranet.

B2B Portal

A simple definition of B2B is any business process between two companies that uses digital technology. The business process could represent one or more functions that provide information, facilitate transactions, execute transactions, or completely integrate shared business processes into separate, existing systems. This is known as e-commerce. B2B concerns itself primarily with supply-chain management. B2B portals allow businesses to deal directly with their suppliers and distributors, allowing online transfers of orders, invoices, and even payments.

Although B2B processes were in existence before portals arrived on the scene, the two are made for each other. Traditionally, B2B portals were hosted by third parties with specialized software, and maintenance used to be a mammoth undertaking. With the advent of industrial-strength portal servers like WebSphere Portal, however, enterprises can host from the same site a regular portal for Internet and intranet users, and a B2B portal, without compromising service or security.

Many experts think that B2B portals will far outpace B2C portals in the coming years. Over the next four to five years, B2B is expected to have a compound annual growth of 41%. The Gartner Group estimates that the worldwide B2B Internet commerce market will be $8.5 trillion in 2005. Business relationships and interbusiness processes will drastically change in the next couple years, giving rise to new methodologies, standards, and the refinement of B2B portals.

A report by ActivMedia Research finds that companies with an online presence attribute one-sixth of their revenue to online sales. In addition to taking orders, the report finds that the main goals of many B2B Web sites are to:

Forge new customer relationships and bolster existing ones with product and sales data

Collect qualified sales leads for follow-up

Enhance post-sales services

B2E Portal

A B2E portal (also sometimes called a people portal), answers questions like these:

What training is available for me, as an employee?

Where can I get some leadership coaching, so I can advance my career?

How does a huge corporation effectively communicate its benefits, bonuses, and other information to its employees worldwide?

A fine distinction exists between an intranet and a B2E portal. An intranet focuses on the company. On an intranet, you expect to find things like hiring policies, the employee directory, and a CEO’s message. You can find much of this information on the B2E portal, but you’ll also find personal information, such as links to how your retirement plan is doing and the details of your current health benefits.

A B2E portal has three distinguishing characteristics, according to searchCIO.com:

A single point of entry: one URL for everyone within an organization

A mixture of organization-specific and employee-defined components

The potential to be highly customized and easily altered to suit the particular employee

In a broad sense, B2E encompasses everything that businesses do to attract and retain well-qualified staff in a competitive market, such as aggressive recruiting tactics, benefits, education opportunities, flexible hours, bonuses, and employee empowerment strategies. Thus, a B2E portal is more focused on the employee as an individual.

Figure I.1 shows w3.ibm.com which is an example of a well laid-out B2E portal. A B2E portal should be the one place that every employee can turn to, anywhere, anytime.

Figure I.1: Example of a B2E portal.

B2C Portal

Commonly known as e-tailing Web sites, B2C portals are geared toward the consumer. The exchange of services, information, and/or products from a business to a consumer defines B2C. With their use of personalization, recommendations, and search engines, B2C portals create a very personalized experience, making it easy for consumers to shop online. Another way to look at a B2C portal is as an intermediary site that links customers to suppliers. Amazon, eBay (shown in Figure I.2), and ZDNet are popular examples of B2C portals.

The eSpending Report, compiled by market research companies, shows that online shopping sales have exhibited phenomenal increases from the previous year. For example, during the 2004 holiday season, sales jumped to $23.2 billion. This reflects a 25 percent increase from the $18.5 billion spent online during the same timeframe in 2003. On a related note, eMarketer, another market research company, claims that online advertisement revenues from display, sponsorship, and rich media advertising will grow by 21% in 2005. Two key factors drive this growth: Consumers want the convenience that e-shopping provides, and multichannel retailers are bolstering their online presences.

Figure I.2: The popular eBay site is an example of a B2C portal.

What’s in the Book?

This book assumes you have little or no prior experience with portals. It does not assume you have extensive experience with Java programming, J2EE, HTML, Web Services, or XML, but neither does it provide an exhaustive description of these technologies.

The book is organized as follows:

Chapter 1 introduces the WebSphere Portal product and discusses the different components that make up WebSphere Portal server.

Chapter 2 explains the concepts, definitions, standards, and architecture in the WebSphere platform.

Chapter 3 deals with planning, installing, and configuring the WebSphere Portal software on the Windows, Solaris, Linux, and AIX platforms.

Chapter 4 shows how to establish a portal site’s unique look and feel, which includes customized banners, color schemes, and page layout.

Chapter 5 deals with personalizing the portal. All aspects of Personalization Server are covered here, so the user gets that feeling of having visited my portal.

Chapter 6 has many code samples, and appropriately so. It introduces the Portlet API and takes you through several different portlet-programming samples.

Chapter 7 talks about security, explains the issues involved in securing a portal, and describes the different ways of achieving single sign-on.

Chapter 8 discusses some of the advanced components of WebSphere Portal, such as Search and Site Analyzer. A discussion is also included of WebSphere Portal Application Integrator and the newest topic—process portals.

Chapter 9 deals with Collaboration and Content Management. This entails working with Lotus components that really differentiate WebSphere Portal from other portal servers.

Chapter 10 shows how to go from a simple Web site to a portal. Some out-of-box portlets are described, and this chapter also illustrates portlet-to-portlet communication and internationalization.

The book ends with some appendices containing information on installing WebSphere Portal, tracing the working of Portal Server, and finding additional sources of information. One particularly useful source is the IBM WebSphere Portlet Catalog.

Who Are We?

We are part of a small but highly technical group at IBM known as the WebSphere Enablement Team. Venkata Gadepalli and Bruce Olson are based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Ashok Iyengar works out of the San Diego, California office.

The team’s reporting chain includes WebSphere Services and the Software Group. The team’s charter is to make WebSphere Software succeed at customer sites, primarily in the pre-sales cycle. We do this by way of proofs of concept (PoCs), technical demonstrations of the software products, architecture and design, mentoring, and even some post-sales activities, such as installation and writing custom code. Most of our work is done at customer locations, which include enterprises around the world. Thus, we provide you with tips and recommendations based on actual experiences.

For the past four years, we have focused on WebSphere Portal and components related to portal technology (such as Personalization Server, portlet programming, Web Content Management, Directory Server, and collaboration). Before that, we worked with the WebSphere Application Server. It has been a great ride—not only have we seen the WebSphere Portal product evolve and mature into one of the premier portal servers on the market, but we also have seen our customers embrace the portal concept, learn about it, and become very sophisticated with its functionality. Actually, customers are taking portal to the next level, using it to create process portals. We see this as the third generation of Internet portals.

Comments?

We hope this book, like the previous edition, will be useful not only as a guide to WebSphere Portal, but also as a text on portal servers in general. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Please help us improve future editions of this book by reporting any inaccuracies, misleading or confusing statements, and plain old typographical errors that you might find. E-mail your reports and comments to us in care of this publisher.

Door Closings

Internet portals are exciting, cutting-edge technology. The very essence of a portal is that users should not know that they are entering one, but once there, they should have access to a plethora of features. The theme throughout this book is that the portal is a doorway, as depicted on the cover.

But how does one go about building a portal? What are these things called portlets? Isn’t a portal just another Web site? We answer these questions, and many others, in this book. Our vehicle is the market-leading WebSphere Portal offering. The ensuing chapters talk about this product, show how to install and configure it, review its salient features, and take you through its typical usage scenarios.

Note: The official name of the product is IBM WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms V5.1. Throughout this book it is referred to as WebSphere Portal. When talking about the portal server in itself, it is referred to as WebSphere Portal server.

Chapter 1

Enter the Portal

Acouple of years ago, a customer mentioned integration at the glass—a phrase that we had not heard before. Now, everybody in the IT world seems to talk about it, and we have Enterprise Portals to thank for that new phrase. What started off as simple Web-based interfaces are now powerful content management and collaboration centers. Portals in general have become the Web interface of choice to provide business users—and the emphasis here is on business users—rapid access to the information and services they need to be more efficient. Integration at the glass might seem superfluous, but that is hardly the case. Integration happens at all levels, and the real benefit of the portal stems from the fact that real integration takes place in the backend, and the results are aggregated and presented at the glass.

So, if you want to be able to integrate with existing backend systems and have a Web interface that provides personalized content along with e-mail and collaboration functionality, you need a framework. IBM WebSphere Portal is one such portal framework that gives individuals the freedom to create virtual desktops and gives enterprises the ability to have integration at the glass.

This chapter includes a technical introduction to IBM WebSphere Portal. For those who are already familiar with the WebSphere Portal product suite, Chapter 3 is where the in-depth technical discussions start.

The WebSphere Platform

Based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), IBM WebSphere Application Server is firmly established as the premier platform in e-business computing. WebSphere scales well and provides enterprises with a comprehensive set of integrated e-business solutions. The current release of WebSphere Application Server is Version 6 but Version 5.1 supports WebSphere Portal V5.1. The three different facets of the WebSphere platform are shown in Figure 1.1. They are Business Portals, Business Integration, and Foundation & Tools. By utilizing each side of the WebSphere pyramid, you can create and operate a dynamic, reliable, and secure e-business.

Figure 1.1: The WebSphere platform pyramid.

Three elements make up the Foundation & Tools portion of WebSphere:

IBM WebSphere Application Server

IBM WebSphere MQ, the messaging middleware component

IBM Rational Application Developer, the Eclipse-based pluggable application-development toolset that supercedes WebSphere Studio Application Developer

The Business Integration side of the product suite pyramid is also known as Business Process Management, or BPM. BPM deals with business modeling, B2B integration, process automation, and message integration. These products are geared to help businesses streamline their operations and save money.

Finally, the Business Portals part of the suite pyramid encompasses products like Portal Server, WebSphere Commerce Server, Tivoli Web Site Analyzer, WebSphere Voice Server, and WebSphere Translation Server. This book covers the IBM WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms, which is IBM’s official name for this product.

WebSphere Portal

WebSphere Portal is software for building and deploying enterprise portals, big and small. It provides an extensible framework for delivering access to enterprise applications and information. As portals enter their third generation of maturity, WebSphere Portal has introduced new concepts of delegated administration, cascading page layouts, portal federation through Web services, advanced portlet applications, business process integration, and advanced personalization.

WebSphere Portal is available in two different offerings known as editions: Enable and Extend. These editions are cumulative in function and components. For example, Extend includes all functionality available in Enable, plus additional functionality. Table 1.1 shows the software components that are packaged in each WebSphere Portal offering. Another version of the software is called WebSphere Portal Express, which is just like the Enable edition but is licensed on per-user basis.

Table 1.1: WebSphere Portal Editions

WebSphere Portal server

WebSphere Portal server provides common services such as application connectivity, integration, administration, and presentation that are required across portal environments. It is installed as another application within WebSphere Application Server, with its own Web and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) container. Since it is part of the WebSphere Application Server, it provides the same benefits of management, cloning, and scaling. The main components running within the Portal Server’s Web container are portlets and portlet applications.

Portlets

A portlet is a small portal application that is displayed as a rectangular area on a Web page. This rectangular area is akin to a miniature browsing area. Portlets are the heart of a portal. They are independent, reusable components that provide access to applications, Web-based content, and other resources. Web pages, services, applications, and syndicated-content feeds can be accessed through portlets.

Portlets are written in Java, utilizing a Portlet Application Programming Interface (API). A standard API now exists, as explained in Chapter 6. Portlets are developed, deployed, managed, and displayed independently of each other. However, you can create special portlets that communicate with each other. Figure 1.2 is a screen shot of one of the default screens of WebSphere Portal server, which is really a portal page entitled Productivity. This page is one of three pages under the page group called My Work, and it contains three portlets—Reminder, My ToDos, and Bookmarks. (You’ll learn more about the concepts of pages, page groups, and portlets in later chapters.)

Figure 1.2: A sample portal page in WebSphere Portal.

Portlets are becoming prevalent in the IT world. Enterprises can create their own portlets or select from a portlet catalog that has portlets made available from IBM and other third-party vendors. Now that a standard Portlet API exists, a portlet written for one portal server can conceivably work in another vendor’s portal server without modifications.

Note: The term portlet is used by IBM, Oracle, BEA, and Sun. Other vendors use terms like gadgets and Web parts.

The IBM portlet catalog is available at http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portlet/catalog. Many of the more than 500 plus portlets are freely downloadable, but some are written by third-party software vendors and require a usage or license fee. Make sure you download and use portlets meant for your particular version of WebSphere Portal server, because portlets written for older versions of WebSphere Portal might not work correctly with the current version 5.1.

Portlet Applications

Portlets, in fact, can be parts of complete applications. A portlet application can contain one or more portlets and follow the model-view-controller (MVC) design. Portlet applications are packaged as Web Archive (.war) files, per the J2EE specifications for Web applications.

Like servlets, portlets run inside a Web container that is part of the portal server. As in the case of servlets, the Web container provides a runtime environment in which portlets are instantiated, used, and finally destroyed. Portlets rely on the portal infrastructure to access user profile information, participate in window and action events, communicate with other portlets, access remote content, look up credentials, and store persistent data.

Portlets, however, are administered more dynamically than servlets. For example, a portlet application consisting of several portlets can be installed or removed while the server is running. An existing portlet can even be dynamically updated with a newer version.

The Portlet API

Portlets are assembled into a larger portal page, with multiple instances of the same portlet displaying different data for each user. Portlets rely on the portal infrastructure for their functionality. Since they are very similar to servlets, it makes sense that IBM portlets are a special subclass of HttpServlet, with properties that allow them to easily plug into and run in the portal server. The portlet Application Programming Interface (API) provides standard interfaces for the portlets’ functionality.

The portlet API defines a common base class and interfaces for portlets, in order to cleanly separate a portlet from the portal infrastructure. In most respects, the portlet API is an extension of the servlet API, except that the Portlet API restricts certain functions to a subset of the full servlets API. This makes sense for portlets running in the context of a portal. For example, unlike servlets, portlets may not send errors or redirects as a response. This is done only by the portal itself, which controls the overall response page.

Normally, one or more portlets are invoked in the course of handling a single request, from a user, each one contributing its content to the overall page display. Some portlets can be rendered in parallel, so that the portal server assembles all the markup fragments when all the portlets finish or time-out. Portlets that are not considered thread-safe will be rendered sequentially.

The markup fragments that portlets produce may contain links, actions, and other content. The portlet API defines URL-rewriting methods that allow portlets to transparently create links, without needing to know how URLs are structured in the particular portal. (The portlet API and its usage in creating portlet applications are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.)

Portal Architecture

WebSphere Portal is a third-generation portal server with a lot of components, and it offers one of the most comprehensive portal solutions. This is possible because WebSphere Portal server mirrors the proven MVC architecture of the WebSphere Application Server. With its own robust portlet API, plus support for the new JSR 168 portlet API, WebSphere Portal not only integrates well with existing backend components, but also is easily extendable.

Enterprises can use existing security systems by using Trust Association Interceptors to achieve portal authentication. You can delegate the authorization decisions out to external security management systems. WebSphere Portal has a Document Manager that is used for collaboration and a Web Content Management component that makes it easy to develop, manage, and publish content to the portal. If enterprises already have third-party content-management systems, WebSphere Portal toolkits are available to interface with many of them.

WebSphere Portal gets installed as a set of J2EE enterprise applications in WebSphere Application Server. Like every other J2EE application, it is comprised of Web Applications and EJBs. Some of the major Enterprise Applications related with WebSphere Portal server are:

WebSphere Member Management or WMM (wmmApp.ear)

WPS Enterprise Application (wps.ear)

WebSphere Content Management or WCM (wcm.ear)

Personalization applications (PZN_Utilities.ear, pznpublish.ear, pznscheduler.ear)

Business Process application (BPEContainer.ear)

Portal Document Management or PDM (pdmauthor.ear, pdmsearchadapter.ear)

In addition to these enterprise applications, about 95 portlets get installed. When you view the WebSphere Application Server Administrative Console, as shown in Figure 1.3, you will see numerous Enterprise Applications, all running on one or more nodes of the WebSphere Application Server. Keep in mind that you can start with the base WebSphere Portal Enable and then add components in the future to move up to the Extend edition.

WebSphere Portal Components

Table 1.2 shows the products and components that are packaged in each WebSphere Portal offering. The rest of this chapter gives you an overview of the major components. Although some of these components either were or still are stand-alone products, they are very nicely integrated with Portal Server.

Figure 1.3: WebSphere Portal enterprise applications.

Table 1.2: WebSphere Portal Product and component matrix