News

Oracle Touts Portlet Factory for SOA Development

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• October 3, 2005

Oracle recently introduced new software that it says will help organizations integrate and interact with information extracted from enterprise business applications and pull it into service-oriented architecture-based enterprise portals.

The Oracle Portlet Factory features a framework and a set of tools for creating and maintaining customized portlets. Developers build portlets by creating a sequence of predefined components or builders. These builders perform specific application functions such as querying a database, executing a business process within an app, or rendering an output user interface.

As they create an app within the factory, developers define an order that the selected builders execute. This definition represents the application structure and function, and is executed at runtime to generate the physical application code, including JSP, Java classes and XML documents. Developers can build portlets to JSR-168, the standard that allows interoperability between portlets and portals.

The Portlet Factory builds composite apps that handle data from SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and the Oracle E-Business Suite. For example, the tool features an integrated development environment and an SAP adapter to build portlets for SAP applications. Developers use the adapter to drag and drop SAP functional components into portlets that are accessed through a business’ internal or external portal.

“Portals are becoming an increasingly essential component to an organization’s SOA strategy,” says Rahul Patel, Oracle’s VP of enterprise portals. “Oracle Portlet Factory helps customers get the most from their existing and future IT, allowing them to easily collect all of their critical information in an enterprise portal, regardless of the data source.”

The Oracle Portal and Oracle Portlet Factory are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, and serve as entry points to SOAs.

The Oracle Portlet Factory also features Bowstreet’s technology for developing and deploying composite applications that grabs data from disparate enterprise sources. The tool is set to be released next year.