This week BEA Portal developers course
Friday 7 October 2005 @ 9:01 am
Filed under:

BEAThis 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

Eclipse 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.

— By Emil van Galen   Comments (4)   PermaLink

Menu


Sha256 mining

Blog Categories

Browse by Date
October 2005
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31EC

Upcoming Events

Monthly Archives

Recent Comments

Links


XML Feeds Option


Get Firefox  Powered by WordPress

code validations
Valid RSS 2.0  Valid Atom 0.3
Valid W3C XHTML 1.0  Valid W3C CSS