John Aylward's Blog

No, not a discourse on traveling in time, just some thoughts on Oracle's Webcenter Suite.

At the moment Oracle has Oracle Portal as a portal and Oracle WebCenter
Suite as a framework for developing portal-type applications.  Many of
the portal features in Oracle Portal are not available out of the box
with the current version of WebCenter Suite, although as time goes by
this is the direction I am sure the product will go.



In basic terms Oracle Portal is for business users and WebCenter is for
Java developers.



The following is an extract from the WebCenter FAQ:



"Oracle WebCenter addresses user interaction requirements holistically
by introducing new capabilities directly into the JavaServer Faces
application environment and providing Web 2.0 services that take
advantage of those capabilities to allow developers to create next
generation, context-centric applications. In essence, with WebCenter,
we have injected portal capabilities directly into the application
architecture rather than requiring a distinct and separate portal
framework. This provides developers focused on 100%
standards-development a complete solution to build any type of user
interaction they require.



In contrast, Oracle Portal is specifically targeted at the enterprise
portal use case, is built on top of a database-centric design-time
architecture, and incorporates a dedicated, portal-specific runtime
framework. It is designed to provide a simple wizard-based experience
to building portals that is targeted at the business developer rather
than the Java developer.



From a pricing and packaging point of view, Oracle Portal is part of
Oracle Application Server Standard and Enterprise Editions while Oracle
WebCenter is a separately priced option on top of Enterprise Edition."



What they are saying ... and I agree with them 100%... is that the
applications of tomorrow are not going to be constrained by a portal
framework and they will use Web 2.0 features to make them more
accessible to end users.  Currently, portals provide users with windows
into existing applications by the use of portlets.  In the future,
users will not see a distinction between different back end
applications because WebCenter will thread everything together with SOA
and present an interface for carrying out a specific task.  In other
words the user will not have immediate access to ALL the functionality
that a back end application makes available, only those parts required
for a particular task.  As far as the developer is concerned, he is not
constrained by the functionality that an application deems to make
available (e.g. a JSR 168 portlet) but will be able to pick and chooses
the services that are required for the task in hand.



So it is true that Portal is the SOA entry
point but ... WebCenter Suite will COMPLETELY change this.  And this
change is happening now.  It will make Oracle the clear leader in the
SOA field.