Level: Introductory Alex Barbosa Coqueiro (alexbc@br.ibm.com), IT Specialist, Lotus Technical Sales Team, IBM
Helmar Martens (hmartens@us.ibm.com), IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Worldwide Customer Support, IBM
05 Jun 2006 This tutorial shows you how to develop a WebSphere portlet application for IBM® WebSphere® Portal V5.1 using Eclipse and WebSphere Portlet Factory. Developers at all skill levels, form novice to expert, can take advantage of the software automation technology offered by Portlet Factory to develop complex portlet applications. You see how to use WebSphere Portlet Factory to develop a portlet that retrieves and displays data from a database.
Objectives - Create and configure a Portlet Factory project
- Create a new Portlet Factory model
- Add specialized database Builders to the model
- Use Builders to externalize the data
- Deploy the portlet to the portal
Prerequisites
The reader needs only introductory level skill in Java™, J2EE, and portlet development in order to follow this tutorial.
System requirements
This tutorial assumes that you have installed and configured WebSphere Portal Version 5.1x and one of the editions of WebSphere Portlet Factory 5.12.0 with Eclipse. Portlet Factory is a plug-in which you install into Eclipse. If you want to use Rational Application Developer see the Portlet Factory product documentation. If you have the products, but have not yet installed Portlet Factory, you can follow the installation instructions in an appendix inside the tutorial. You also need a data source named jdbc/v5/sample which must be configured to connect to the Sample database that ships with DB2. Prior to starting this tutorial, test your data source and make sure that you can connect to the Sample database.
Duration
2 hours
Formats html, pdf
Overview of WebSphere Portlet Factory
WebSphere Portlet Factory provides a framework and development environment for developing portlets and Web applications. You can use it to rapidly develop portlets, even if you have a limited knowledge of the Java programming language.
WebSphere Portlet Factory supports a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by implementing different application layers through the use of multiple models. Service Provider Models access back-end data and services. Service Consumer modes (presentation layer) provide a front end web user interface. Portlet Factory automatically generates both layers and creates all the necessary artifacts to enable loose coupling between layers.
Portlet Factory accomplishes software automation through its Builder technology. Builders are reusable software components which generate software assets, such as HTML, JSP tags, XML schemas, Java code, and other artifacts. For example, you can use a Builder to create a button on a JSP page, or to create a set of JSPs pages which display database content. Every Builder can be accessed and reused by other Builders to create new functionality.
Builder calls are managed and stored into models. In other words, a model is a container for Builder calls, and a model is an XML document which saves Builder calls and configurations.
You can deploy Portlet Factory projects to both WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal Server. While developing Portlet Factory projects as portlet applications, you have to take into consideration a few aspects that are specific to portlet application development.
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