Release 12 and Third-Party Portals

What’s Possible in Release 11i Today

You already know that the E-Business Suite Release 11i portlets are written to work exclusively with Oracle Portal.  These portlets can’t be plugged into third-party portal solutions.  We don’t have any plans to rewrite these portlets for Release 11i, so what you see is what you will get for the foreseeable future for 11i.

Before we look ahead to the future and Release 12, here’s a two-word reminder of what’s possible today in terms of third-party portal integration with Release 11i:  bookmarkable links.

If someone who hasn’t logged in attempts to access protected E-Business Suite content, they’re automatically redirected to either the E-Business Suite login page or Oracle Single Sign-On, the latter if the environment has been integrated with Oracle Application Server 10g.  Once the user logs in, she’s redirected back to the protected E-Business Suite content that she was originally trying to reach.

Links to E-Business Suite content, therefore, can be bookmarked — either in a browser, or added as links on a third-party portal page.  Admittedly, this might be pretty thin gruel for those of you expecting more, but that’s what’s available in Release 11i today.

Release 12, JSR-168, and WSRP

We’re still in the process of beefing up our portlet infrastructure for Release 12, so I need to preface what follows with the usual disclaimer:  this is subject to change without notice. 


With that out of the way, I can say that our plans are to rewrite our existing Oracle Applications Framework Web Provider to JSR-168 and WSRP standards.  This means switching from the existing Java Portlet Development Kit (JPDK 3.0.9) to the new JSR-168 Oracle Java Portlet Container.

If all goes according to plan, this means that you will be able to plug the Release 12 E-Business Suite portlets into any third-party portal that supports the JSR-168 and WSRP standards.

Curves In The Road Ahead

Given the inherent limitations of web-based protocols, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the JSR-168 and WSRP standards aren’t quite as feature-rich as the existing JPDK libraries. 

In other words, there are things we can do today with the JPDK that will require considerably more ingenuity to pull off with JSR-168 and WSRP.  For example, dynamic portlet generation and invalidation-based caching have less-powerful equivalents in the new standards.

Until we work through these issues, it’s safe to expect that the existing E-Business Suite portlets may look and function a bit differently in Release 12.

Preserving Your Existing Portlets

We’re planning to certify and include the latest JPDK 10.1.2 libraries in the Release 12 Rapid Install, too.  If you’ve invested in building custom JPDK portlets for the E-Business Suite, this means that those portlets will continue to work, providing you with some breathing space during your Release 12 migration. 

The above is intended to outline our general product direction.  It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.   It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decision.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.