IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory features two key components:

• IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer
• Dynamic Profiling

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer Features

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory includes an easy-to-use graphical tool for creating, viewing, and running portlets. The WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer provides simplified rapid application development of custom portlets for IBM WebSphere Portal that leverage existing enterprise applications, data and systems - including IBM Lotus Domino, SAP, PeopleSoft, DB2 and Web Services, among others. It does this all without requiring Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development expertise, and without developers needing to implement and learn application and portal APIs by automating portlet development with reusable wizard-like components, called Builders. This automation is proven to speed custom portlet development by up to 12X with existing IT resources, which not only reduces development time and cost, but accelerates portal deployment for incremental ROI.

Figure 1. IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer

Builders

At the core of the IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer are software automation components called Builders.

These Builders capture design intelligence and automate the creation of code. Similar to customizable robots in an assembly line, Builders perform specific automation tasks, based upon inputs or parameters specified by developers. WebSphere Portlet Factory ships with over 165 Builders that automate a wide range of tasks, such as creating HTML from a schema or integrating with common back-end systems (like IBM Lotus Domino, SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Web Services, JDBC-compliant databases, etc.).

Builders have easy-to-use, wizard-like user interfaces, which speed development, thereby masking the complexities of the underlying J2EE or portal APIs, as well as produce portlets that are service-oriented architecture (SOA) compliant. As a result, Builders increase developer productivity, reduce coding errors, and improve code quality.

Behind the scenes, a Builder is made up of a Java class that performs the appropriate automation task (like creating the JSP for the button) and an XML document that defines the Builder's characteristics. Since Builders are based on an open, extensible architecture, developers can easily create their own Builders to automate custom design patterns or to enforce compliance to company architectural and coding standards.

Benefits of Builders

• Builders take care of the repetitive programming tasks that developers typically do and re-do by hand, such as wiring up data to presentation. The net result is that Builders free developers from mundane programming tasks, allowing them to focus on tackling the hard problems that are of more business value to the organization.
• Builders help ensure the consistency and quality of the code, dramatically reducing the need for code reviews. In addition, Builders help make sure that programmers don't make the type of errors that can sometimes take hours to track down.
• Builders can enhance developer's productivity because they automate complex programming tasks and can be reused across applications.
• Builders help shield developers from the pain of making changes to applications. For instance, a change made to one Builder can ripple throughout an entire application and set of related applications.
• Through Builders, architects and senior developers can enforce compliance to company architectural and coding standards.
• Builders enable iterative development, enabling developers to quickly and easily react to changing business and technical requirements.
• By creating Builders, Java developers can encapsulate and automate commonly used design patterns, best practices, and business processes. Less experienced developers can then more easily utilize these Builders to create standards-compliant applications and portlets. Builders thus help reduce the skill level needed to create robust applications.
  In short, by leveraging Builders, You and your developers can reap dramatic benefits, such as increased productivity, higher quality code, and the ability to quickly react to change.
  

Dynamic Profiling Features

You may want to create applications that are highly customized for your partners, customers, and employees. At the same time, you may also want to lower application maintenance costs. Unfortunately, with traditional tools and technologies, it is very difficult to achieve both high levels of customization along with lower maintenance costs.

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory is architected to solve both of these requirements for customization and lower maintenance costs with a unique capability called Dynamic Profiling. This capability helps developers quickly and easily create multiple, highly customized applications from one code base, all without requiring additional code changes, redeployment of files, or publishing of HTML and JSP. A WebSphere Portlet Factory developer simply needs to apply different profile values to the Builders to generate multiple applications with varying presentation, business logic, data sources, and workflows.

Thus, with profiling, you can create an unlimited number of adaptive, role-driven applications that change on demand. Without profiling, you need to maintain multiple versions of your portlet applications or write conditional logic to achieve the same effect.

Examples

WebSphere Portlet Factory's Dynamic Profiling allows you to:

• Build adaptive portlets that can change depending on the characteristics or role of the user, without the need for conditional coding and without having to maintain multiple versions of the code.
  Example 1: An HR self-service portlet can display vacation time for an individual employee when the employee logs in. If a manager were to log in, the same portlet could display the vacation time for all employees within the department.
  Example 2: When a sales rep from California logs into his sales dashboard, he sees only the data for his region and his assigned product. When a sales executive from Germany logs into this same exact dashboard, she sees a rollup of all the reps that report to her, for all the products she owns, and in her native language.
  For each of these examples, there is only one code base for the portlets and the application. All tailored variations are created dynamically via profiling.
• Reuse code bases by creating different variations of the same application.
  Example: By simply profiling the back-end data source, a portlet that displays CRM info from SAP can be reused to display data from Siebel.

Dynamic Profiling enables you to quickly create many variations of an application or portlet from one underlying model, without having to copy and paste code or write conditional logic.

Licensing Options

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer is licensed for operation on a per user basis.
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory is licensed for operation on a per processor basis.

Software and Operating System Requirements

WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer

Operating systems

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

• IBM Rational® Application Developer 6
• IBM Rational Software Architect
• IBM Rational Web Developer
• Eclipse 3.1
  

Note: Eclipse SDK versions only

Deployed applications

Operating systems

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
• Sun Solaris 8 (Latest patch level required)
• IBM AIX V5.1
• OS/400 V5.2 (on IBM eServer iSeries hardware)
• Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 8.x
• SUSE Linux 9.2
  

Application servers

• WebSphere Application Server V.5.1, V6.0
• Apache Tomcat 5.5.7 (development use only)
  

Portal servers

• IBM Workplace Services Express V2.6
• WebSphere Portal V5.1, V5.1.0.2
• Portals complying with JSR-168 standard
  

Web browsers

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0
• Netscape Communicator 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.23
• Mozilla Firefox 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6
  

JDK support

• Java® 2 SDK, Standard Edition V1.4.1, 1.4.2
  

Enterprise integrations

Databases

• Oracle 9i Release 2 V9.2.0.1.0
• Oracle 8i Enterprise Release 3 V8.1.7 (With thin driver for 8.1.7 and/or classes12.zip)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (with msbase.jar, mssqlserver.jar, msutil.jar)
• IBM DB2® Enterprise Edition V8.1
• DB2 Enterprise Edition V7.2 (FixPack 7 Required w/db2java.zip)
• Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.5 (Requires Version 5.5 of jConnect for JDBC with EBF/Patch 11937, dated April 30, 2004)
  

IBM Lotus Domino — Lotus Domino V5.x, V6.0, V6.5, V7.0 (Requires Version 6, or later NCSO.jar)

SAP solutions

• R3 V3.1h, or later (Requires SAPCO.jar)
• SAP Business Warehouse
  

PeopleSoft Systems — PeopleSoft 8.x Systems (Requires PSJOA.jar. Any PeopleSoft 8.x or later system that supports access to Component Interfaces via this jar is supported)

Siebel Systems — Siebel 7.5.2, 7.5.3 (Requires version-appropriate JAR files: SiebelJI.jar, SiebelJI_Common.jar, and SiebelJI_enu.jar)

For more documentation, please see: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/genservers/portletfactory/reqs/index.html