Portal Architect's Toolbox (Continued)
BEA Systems: Interface for Custom Apps
BEA's Architect's Toolbox
The shift in the portal market to enterprise standards plays to BEA's strengths as it seeks to extend its leadership in the market for J2EE application servers to a broader market for application infrastructure. Layering a portal framework and services over its WebLogic platform provides a robust environment for exposing custom application functionality to employees, customers, and business partners. With its focus on facilitating custom development, BEA places emphasis on its easy-to-use portlet development tools.
Technology
BEA WebLogic Portal is built on the J2EE architecture using JSP, servlets, and JSP tag libraries for the presentation layer and scalable EJB Session Bean for the portal core (see Figure 1). The framework leverages the complete set of J2EE capabilities and services provided by WebLogic Server, such as JDBC connection pools and Mbeans. Portal information is persisted in a relational database, and the configuration information is expressed in XML. APIs to extend the functionality of WebLogic Portal services and portlet functionality give access to applications from other e-business vendors in areas like analytics, collaboration, search, and content syndication.
Product
BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 includes portal foundation services for portal creation and customization; intelligent administration for portal deployment and management; integration services that provide extensibility to leverage current and future application infrastructure investments; and a collection of prebuilt portlets, providing content or application-specific functionality.
Product datasheet: BEA Web Portal
Application
Toshiba America Business Solutions' FYI Portal is a business-to-business dealer portal providing access to online procurement, training, technical support, and sales incentive programs. The program lowers channel management costs, empowers dealers, and maximizes sales effectiveness and is built with BEA WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal.
Case Study: Toshiba America Strengthens Dealer Loyalty and Maximizes Sales Effectiveness
Analyst's View
Application Platform Suites (APS) will have three components: the application server, enterprise integration capability, and portal. BEA has all of the pieces and they are coupled fairly tightly, but the functionality in the integration product is not as complete as with some of the other competitors. Right now, BEA doesn't have the pieces of a Smart Enterprise Suites (SES) [knowledge management and collaboration], so it may try to partner or acquire technology in this area.
David Gootzit, Gartner, December 2002
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