WebCenter 11g (11.1.1.8 and earlier) provides two distinct ways to build portals – portal builder and portal framework. The first approach relies on the pre-build “portal builder” application to construct portals (previously called “spaces”) primarily through a web-based administrative interface, while the latter relies on developers to design, configure and deploy their own custom Oracle ADF portal application using JDeveloper. For those of you may still think both are viable options, stop now as the choice is clear.
Portal Framework is dead
About a year ago, WebCenter Product Management quietly made the decision to focus on the portal builder approach and discourages any future portal framework development. In fact, they’ve stopped adding new features to the portal framework technology (they’ll only fix bugs, if reported), and it is NOT available in WebCenter Portal 12c. Don’t worry though, you can still extend the capabilities of WebCenter portal via JDeveloper, it just isn’t the primary portal building tool. Oracle has released a whitepaper for customers who would like to prepare for the migration of a WebCenter Portal Framework application onto a WebCenter Portal Server.
