In a little over a month, the annual Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) will kick off in San Francisco. If you’ve never been, it’s a sight to behold. 40,000 or so people show up to learn about all things Oracle, which has been a rapidly expanding set of “all things.” Within the last two-plus years, Oracle has acquired the big names in the Java world of BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems (of course Sun had much more going for it than Java). Oracle has habitually added its new acquisitions to the party, and this year is no exception. JavaOne is now taking place at the same time as OOW and is available to OOW attendees for a small fee.
Of course, as a portal guy, the BEA acquisition was most interesting to me. BEA had two strong Portal lines, WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic User Interaction. Both have lived on as parts of the WebCenter Suite, though neither is considered “strategic” in the long term. In the WebCenter Suite, the BEA Products joined the new WebCenter Framework, which offers a new perspective on what a portal can and should be. Last summer, WebCenter Spaces was introduced and added to the lineup. The two WebCenter Portals are considered “strategic” and therefore will be available for the long haul.
WebCenter Framework (WCF) really turns a traditional portal on its head. It’s truly a framework, allowing developers to create applications as they wish and essentially inject portal functionality into them. WCF’s roots are in Oracle’s Application Development Framework which itself is based on JSF. The ADF and WCF allow developers to rapidly build dynamic, rich internet applications (RIA) in a declarative fashion using Oracle’s JDeveloper IDE.
WebCenter Spaces (WCS) is and out of the box application built with the WebCenter Framework. For those familiar with AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI, the former Plumtree Portal), Spaces offers much of the same functionality. The key differences are that WCS allows all of the customization allowed by the WebCenter Framework, and has strong out of the box integrations to the various WebCenter Services. As I discussed in a post last year, WebCenter Spaces offers collaboration and web (enterprise) 2.0 functionality to the various portal offerings.
Beyond the portal offerings, the WebCenter Suite offers the aforementioned WebCenter Services and limited licenses for Secure Enterprise Search and Universal Content Management.
Seem like a lot to take in? We’re just getting started! If you’d like to learn more, I suggest making out to OOW. If you’d like to discuss it further with some experts from Perficient, just stop by our booth at 301 Moscone South. We’d love to talk to you about anything, but especially topics like the following:
- I was a BEA customer for years. What do I do now?
- I’m new to Oracle Portals. Where do I start?
- I just bought the WebCenter Suite. Which of the portals should I use?
- Can I use WebCenter Spaces as a starting point for a custom portal?
