 | Level: Intermediate Thomas Stober (tstober@de.ibm.com), Software Architect, IBM WebSphere Portal Development, IBM
Peter Fischer (peter.fischer3@de.ibm.com), Software Engineer, IBM
Hendrik Haddorp (hendrik.haddorp@de.ibm.com), WebSphere Portal Developer, IBM
23 Aug 2006 A key element in supporting a services oriented architecture is giving your business analysts the ability to implement complex logic using pre-built components. Enter composite applications, which are now supported in WebSphere Portal Version 6. Using well-designed, appropriate toolsets, your business professionals define the configuration and interaction of components (portlets, processes, and other code artifacts), and your designers determine how the user interface should be arranged on the glass. The result is a business driven model of application development, with investment by the whole team, through carefully constructed templates. See how our mythical "Funny Bikes" company puts templates and composite applications to work in a detailed example.
In this article
- Java developers craft the components
- Application designers create the application templates using the components
- The portal administrator deploys the templates
- Business users create composite applications based on the templates
Summary
WebSphere Portal V6 provides enhancements in many technical areas to help your company improve productivity, accelerate application and content deployment, and to increase responsiveness and reliability. Composite applications enable end users to translate their knowledge and skills into business value by assembling complex applications out of a set of components.
This article provides a starting point for understanding how templates and applications work together. You learn how to employ the key features in the composite application infrastructure including:
- Parameterization of components, by defining points of variability within template.
- Application level roles, which aggregate fine-grained portal access control roles to simplified roles representing application specific semantics.
- Membership, which lets the owner of an application instance assign individuals to application level roles.
- A set of public APIs, which component developers can use to leverage the capabilities of the application infrastructure.
Downloads | Description | Name | Size | Download method |
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| Article in PDF format | 0608_stober-CompositeApps.pdf | 652 KB | HTTP |
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| Code sample | compapp-samples.zip | 51 KB | HTTP |
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About the authors | 
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Dr. Thomas Stober is the release architect for WebSphere Portal and owns the technical responsibility for the WebSphere Portal V6.0 release. Thomas is also a key player in IBM's composite application effort. In the past, Thomas has focused on virtual portal, software componentization, mobile computing, and data synchronization. Thomas is co-author of the book Pervasive Computing Handbook. |
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| | Peter Fischer is the lead for the application infrastructure in the WebSphere Portal foundation, and is . responsible for composite applications. Previously, Peter was the lead on the ISC 6.0 effort in the foundation and the implementation of the WSRP standard in portal. He also has been part of the development team of WebSphere Application Server for zSeries Peter is co-author of book Portlets and Apache Portals. |
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Hendrik Haddorp works on the application infrastructure in WebSphere Portal. He is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the templating and instantiation component. Since joining WebSphere Portal in 2003, he has gained experience in many different areas of the WebSphere Portal foundation and in portlet deployment. He also worked on the relocation of the portlet container from WebSphere Portal into WebSphere Application Server. |
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