WebSphere Commerce Portal V5.4 Solutions

4 WebSphere Commerce Portal V5.4 Solutions

1.1 Overview

As e-businesses have evolved to provide content-rich Web sites, a need has

arisen to provide the user with a single point of access to content personalized to

their interests.

The release of the IBM Commerce Enhancement Pack - April 2003 Edition

includes commerce integration code for WebSphere Portal and WebSphere

Commerce. This integration functionality is referred to as a commerce enabled

portal. When using a commerce enabled portal, users gain the ability to have a

single point of access to personalized content and applications in portlets on the

portal pages for standard Web browser clients and mobile device clients.

1.1.1 Key concepts of portals

A portal provides a framework for developing portal applications and a runtime

environment where portlets can be deployed. The runtime environment is a

portal container that runs in a J2EE environment such as the WebSphere

Application Server. The portal infrastructure includes the following core set of

services:

򐂰 Access to user profile information

򐂰 A framework for portlets to participate in events

򐂰 A framework to communicate with other portlets

򐂰 Access to remote content

򐂰 Access to credentials

򐂰 A framework for storing persistent data

The IBM WebSphere Portal provides the services listed and other important

features such as single sign-on, security, Web content publishing, search,

personalization, collaboration, enterprise application integration, and support for

mobile devices.

This section describes the key concepts associated with portals and portlets,

which are the base technology used for commerce enabled portals.

Portal

A portal-enabled Web site typically provides a variety of services such as Web

search, news feeds, personalization of content displayed in portlets, e-commerce

and links to other sites. The Portal Server provides the base runtime

infrastructure and development portlet API for portals. IBM’s portal product

offering is called IBM WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms, which comes in three

editions (Enable, Extend, and Experience).

Chapter 1. Introduction to commerce enabled portals 5

Figure 1-1 displays several administration portlets (Welcome, Quick links, World

clock, Reminder) displayed on the WebSphere Portal home page.

Figure 1-1 WebSphere Portal home page

Portlet

A portlet is a Java application that is written to the portlet API and hosted on a

Portal Server. Portlets can be developed within IBM WebSphere Studio

Application Developer using WebSphere Portal Toolkit (plug-in). The portlets are

deployed to the WebSphere Portal Server runtime environment. In Figure 1-1,

there are several portlets displayed and additional portlets available from the

pull-down menu where the Home tab is currently displayed. The portlets

displayed and the content within the portlets can be aggregated and

personalized.

6 WebSphere Commerce Portal V5.4 Solutions

Figure 1-2 displays the ITSO working example of a commerce enabled portal

B2B store. Within this portal page, there are several commerce portlets, including

category display, product display and item display.

Figure 1-2 WebSphere Commerce Portal page with category, product, and item commerce portlets

Portlet application

A portlet application is a set of portlets grouped together and executable from a

single access point. Portlets within the portlet application package share the

same context (for example, images, properties files, and classes). The portlet

application portlets are packaged into a Web archive (WAR) file. Portlets within

the portlet application can communicate with other portlets using custom

messages.