WebSphere Commerce Portal V5.4 Solutions

Chapter 2. WebSphere Commerce Portal architecture 51

WebSphere Portal Toolkit

The WebSphere Portal Toolkit is provided with WebSphere Portal and provides

an environment for developing portals using WebSphere Portal. The WebSphere

Portal Toolkit is a plug-in for WebSphere Studio Application Developer or

WebSphere Studio Site Developer, which adds the portal development

environment.

The WebSphere Portal Toolkit provides the ability to quickly create complete

MVC-compliant portlet applications. It also provides intuitive editors for working

with the deployment descriptors required by your portlet applications.

Furthermore, it allows you to dynamically debug your portlet applications.

Where to find more information

To find more detailed information on WebSphere Portal, refer to the following

Redbooks:

򐂰 WebSphere Portal V4.1 Handbook Volume 1, SG24-6883

򐂰 WebSphere Portal V4.1 Handbook Volume 2, SG24-6920

򐂰 WebSphere Portal V4.1 Handbook Volume 3, SG24-6921

򐂰 WebSphere Portal V4.1 Developer’s Handbook, SG24-6897

򐂰 Mobile Applications with IBM WebSphere Everyplace Access Design and

Development, SG24-6259

򐂰 Access Integration Pattern using IBM WebSphere Portal Server, SG24-6267

2.3 Mobile client access

Over the past couple of years, mobile computing has increased dramatically and

many customers are in need of solutions for providing mobile client access to

commerce sites for mobile commerce. Simply put, mobile commerce, or

m-commerce, is electronic commerce using mobile devices such as a mobile

phone or a wireless PDA.

IBM has developed two solutions for providing mobile device access to

WebSphere Commerce Web sites, mobile commerce direct, and commerce

enabled portals. In either case, the mobile devices equipped with a micro Web

browser will be served content in a markup language the mobile device

understands, such as WAP WML or i-mode cHTML. WebSphere Commerce can

also communicate to clients using SMS or e-mail. However, in this redbook we

limit our mobile device support discussion to mobile clients with a micro Web

browser accessing a commerce enabled portal site.

52 WebSphere Commerce Portal V5.4 Solutions

Both WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal include an architecture to

support mobile devices. For legacy reasons, WebSphere Commerce Portal uses

the PvC adapter technology included with WebSphere Commerce to support

mobile devices.

Unique challenges presented by mobile devices

This section describes the unique challenges presented by mobile devices, as

well as a functionality overview of the features added to enable WebSphere

Commerce for mobile commerce.

򐂰 Session control

Session control provides a means for a Web server to keep track of the client

system users’ transactions, valid URLs, and preferences. On a standard Web

browser client, session control is often maintained by using a cookie in

cooperation with the browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape

Navigator.

In the mobile computing world, some mobile devices do not support cookies

on the client device. In other cases, the session may be maintained by the

service provider protocol gateway (for example, WAP).

For this reason, the Web server needs another way to identify such a

cookie-less device as a client.

WebSphere Commerce supports a function that enables session control

between a Web server and mobile device by using a unique identifier stored

in a WebSphere Commerce PvC session table called PVCSESSION. The

unique identifier information is sent in the HTTP request header provided by

the mobile telecommunication carrier or created automatically by the PvC

Adapter.

򐂰 Device control

There are several categories of mobile devices such as mobile phones,

PDAs, and wireless laptops. Within the categories of mobile devices, there

are often unique characteristics and specifications. For example, two WAP

phones, whether from the same manufacturer or different manufacturers, may

vary from each other in the following features:

–Microbrowser

– Size of screen

– Screen resolution

– Color capability

–Size of memory

WebSphere Commerce provides the ability to detect the mobile device type

via the incoming HTTP request from the mobile device, and send back the

JSPs with the appropriate content and images for that mobile device. This