This week together with three collegues (Simon Peter Haverdings, Martin Jaspers Focks and Robert Berg) I’m folowing a BEA Portal developers course. The course is given by a BEA trainer from the UK at the LogicaCMG office in Rotterdam. The course gives a nice overview of the BEA Portal product including BEA’s own Workshop IDE and the portal administration console. To give a rough idea the course handles the following subjects: - development installation of BEA Portal inclusing the Workshop IDE - how to set up a basic portal site that consists of a desktop (with header and footer), (sub) books, pages and portlets inside the pages.
- how to customize and override the look and feel and themes of the portal and porlets
- customize the layouts in witch portlets are placed inside a page
- Working with Java Page Flows (JPF for short) including the nifty Workshop graphical editor
- Portlet state management and user profile / property management
- Easy webservice and database integration inside JPF’s
- Integration of content management systems (CMS) inside your portlets
- Personalise content based on simple rules
- Events
- How to create ad compain based on events or user profile
The BEA Workshop IDE can’t match with the Eclipse IDE for pure Java development, but it contains nice wizards and graphical editors to support for BEA portal development. In simple situations it’s simple a case op opening an editor, drag some items from a (data) palette and make some changes in either the property editor or a dialog. In almost all situations the data displayed in the graphical editors is in fact a XML file with a XML Schema attached to it. So using Eclipse 3.1.1 with WTP 0.7 and custom ANT scripts might be an option to kick out the BEA Workshop 
A really nifty graphical editor inside the Workshop is used for the Java Page Flows (JPF for short). It draws a diagram for the JPF classes with the JSP pages and the actions between theme. You can easily drag JSP pages (new or existing) and new actions onto the JPF diagram and also adding simple form data is a super easy. Looking under the hood it appears that the Java Page Flows are implemented using struts. From what I have seen during the course and the labs of the course, BEA Portal handles a lot a portal related stuff that you would normally have to arrange yourself in a struts application. But then again the Lab exercises in the course a quite simple, and in the real world most customers want to have features that a not standard
Today the last day of the course… And after that I will probably not be involved with BEA portal for quite some time, since I have to round up my assignment at NS Reizigers and after that it’s some serious time off until the 24th of november for a large (well deserved ) holiday.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Emil, So you had this traning for pure major fun or are you going on a BEA sponsored holiday?
Can you explain a bit more about the integration of CMS systems inside portlets. Is it JSR170 based, or is it a BEA lock-in kind of solution? Hwat are the possibilities, impossibilities pro’s and con’s so to say?
October 7th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Well there should be some BEA Portal related work for me and the other fellow trainies. But since I still had a lot of unused holidays, I booked a long nice trip for myself.
The CMS portlet integration is based on JSR-170, but is not exactly the same.
Furthermore it’s hard to give a list of the possibilities, impossibilities pro’s and con’s based on a course that handles broad base of subjects and does not go into too much detail.
October 13th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Based on JSR-170 but not exactly the same? Hummm … sounds like yet another standard not adopted a hundred percent caused by the fact it is a ‘community’ standard and ‘community’ also includes ‘competitors’.
October 17th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
BEA Selects Day as Provider of JSR-170 Bridge:
link
Funny, a press release on the exact same day I comment about JSR-170 and BEA