Up to now, most portals have been marketed as standalone products, but increasingly, portal technology is also being incorporated into other software solutions such as content managements systems, business intelligence tools, e-business applications packages, and Web application software. This is especially the case as the software industry's key players enter the portal marketplace. One of the latest entrants is Oracle with its Oracle9i Application Server (AS), which incorporates a Java-based framework for building and customizing a portal. Both the standard and enterprise editions of Oracle9iAS come with this framework.

Oracle's main marketing strategy is to compete with other industry leaders such as IBM and Microsoft by encouraging customers to purchase complete end-to-end Oracle solutions rather than use an infrastructure to integrate best-of-breed products from multiple vendors. The three key products that form the cornerstone of this strategy are Oracle9iAS, Oracle9i Database, and the Oracle E-Business Suite. The Oracle portal is a key component of Oracle9iAS and is particularly well suited to providing business users with a single, personalized view of Web information and applications. Oracle also uses the portal framework to provide out-of-the-box portal solutions for use with its E-Business Suite.

User's View

The Oracle portal Web interface is similar to that of many other portal products. It consists of personalized portal "pages" that are subdivided into "regions." Each region on a page is formatted using HTML or XML/XSL and contains one or more "portlets" that provide access to a specific business content source such as a Web site, database application, or newsfeed. A portlet can also point to an Oracle portal "content area" that acts as a central store for managing shared documents, images, and so on.

There are two types of portlets: Web portlets and database portlets. You maintain Web portlets on Web servers that the Oracle portal can access. In theory, you can write these server-side applications in Java, Perl, C, or even as Microsoft Active Server Pages. But in reality, the development tools that come with the Oracle portal favor Java. (Note that you could define a non-Java portlet to the portal as a Web URL). A Web portlet communicates with the Oracle portal using the XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol, so you could develop a portlet as a Web service. A database portlet lets the user interact with data and is maintained as a stored procedure in the Oracle portal database. You can write these portlets in PL/SQL or in Java with a PL/SQL wrapper.

Oracle 9iAS provides a portal development kit that enables third-party software vendors and IT staff to develop their own portlets and add them to the Oracle portal. The product comes with several built-in portlets for connecting to newsfeeds, linking to external applications, building a list of favorite Web links, performing searches, and so forth. There are also portlets for building portal pages, portal content areas, and portal Web applications.

You create a portal page when you want to give a user (a consumer, for example) access to content from a variety of different sources. You personalize the portal page to suit the specific content requirements of each portal user. When several users need to manage and access business content in a shared store, they can use a portal content area.

Adequate Content Management

A portal content area consists of a hierarchical set of folders that contain items such as files, Web URLs, pointers to other folders, Java applications, multimedia objects, and so on. Each item has attributes such as display name, description, and search keywords. You can define additional item types, each with its own unique attributes. These attributes can be defined as mandatory (the user must assign values to them when creating a new item) or optional.

All items in a content area must be assigned to a "business category." You create categories based on a business taxonomy, making it easier for users to organize and find information in a content area. You may also classify items by one or more "perspectives." You could, for example, have a press release folder that has categories for different technologies, and use perspectives to separate press releases by vendor or time period. Users can search the content store by category, perspective, keyword, or attribute. They can also use full-text searches. Within a content area, you can publish folders, categories, and perspectives as portlets.

You can add items to a content area by using the Web interface or by bulk loading items in a ZIP file. When you add items, you have to specify the category it belongs to manually; the product doesn't have an automated categorization manager. Facilities exist at a folder level for adding item check-in, check-out, and versioning. Administrators control user-access security at the folder level or at an individual folder item level.

The Oracle portal content area is suited to managing Web and multimedia content, but it's not likely to become a major competitor to more traditional document management systems or collaborative products such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.

Web Database Applications

The Oracle portal page shown in Figure 1 can also be used to build Web database applications. This component of the portal framework has evolved from Oracle's WebDB tools, which were originally designed to provide a simple approach to Web-enabling database applications.