8 Integrating WebLogic Portal and Coherence

This chapter describes how Oracle Coherence integrates with Oracle WebLogic Portal. Specifically, Coherence includes the following integration points: Coherence*Web for HTTP session state management, a Personalization (P13N) CacheProvider SPI implementation, and a blueprint for efficiently sharing data between Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)-federated portals that use Coherence and the WebLogic Portal Custom Data Transfer mechanism.

This chapter contains the following sections:

8.1 P13N CacheProvider SPI Implementation

Internally, WebLogic Portal uses its own caching service to cache portal, personalization, and commerce data as described at the following URL:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15919_01/wlp.1032/e14255/com/bea/p13n/cache/package-summary.html

WebLogic Portal 8.1.6 and later includes an SPI for the P13N caching service that can be implemented by third-party cache vendors. Coherence includes a P13N cache provider SPI implementation (com.tangosol.coherence.weblogic.PortalCacheProvider) that, when installed into a WebLogic Portal application, transparently manages cached P13N data without requiring code changes. Combining Coherence and WebLogic Portal also gives you more flexibility in your choice of cache topologies.

For example, if you find that your Portal servers are exceeding the 4 GB heap limit (on 32-bit JVMs) or are experiencing slow garbage collection (GC) times, you can use a cache client/server topology to move the serializable P13N state out of your Portal JVMs and into one or more dedicated Coherence cache servers,. This reduces your Portal JVM heap size and GC times. Also, you can use the Coherence Management Framework to closely monitor statistics to better tune your P13N cache settings. Finally, the Coherence cache provider also allows your portlets to use Coherence caching service by using the standard P13N Cache API.

To install the Coherence P13N cache provider:

  1. Copy the coherence-wlp.jar and coherence.jar libraries included from the lib directory of the Coherence installation to the APP-INF/lib directory of your WebLogic Portal application.

  2. Configure the Coherence P13N cache provider, PortalCacheProvider, as the default provider in the p13n-cache-config.xml file found in each of your WebLogic Portal application's META-INF directory. Specifically, add the following line immediately before the first <cache> element:

    <default-provider-id>com.tangosol.coherence.weblogic</default-provider-id>
    

See the Javadoc for the PortalCacheProvider class for details on configuring the Coherence CacheProvider and Coherence caches used by the provider.

See the following document for a list of caches used by WebLogic Portal:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15919_01/wlp.1032/e14227/toc.htm

8.2 Sharing Data Between WSRP-Federated Portals Using Coherence

The WSRP protocol was designed to support the federation of portals hosted by arbitrary portal servers and server clusters. Use WSRP to aggregate content and the user interface (UI) from various portlets hosted by other remote portals. By itself, WSRP does not address the challenge of implementing scalable, reliable, and high-performance federated portals that create, access, and manage the life cycle of data shared by distributed portlets. However, WebLogic Portal provides an extension to the WSRP specification that, when coupled with Oracle Coherence, allows WSRP consumers and producers to create, view, modify, and control concurrent access to shared, scoped data in a scalable, reliable, and high-performance manner.

For more information, see the following URL:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15919_01/wlp.1032/e14235/toc.htm