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Siebel Web Engine Infrastructure

The Siebel Web Engine (SWE) makes possible the deployment of applications in HTML and other markup languages. A Web client (or other Siebel client) interacts with the server-based object manager through the Siebel Web Engine, as shown in Figure 5.

When accessing Siebel applications using the Web client, no components are hosted on the client. The client interacts through a Web browser. The user accesses a specified URL that navigates to a Web-server hosted application. This Web server application is, in turn, supplied with HTML (or equivalent) pages generated by the Siebel Web Engine service in the object manager. The Siebel Web Engine consists of components on two servers—the Siebel Plug-In (also called Siebel Web Extension) on the Web server, and the Siebel Web Engine service in the object manager on the Siebel Server.

A Siebel plug-in (for Microsoft Web server software) runs on the Web server, and interfaces with the Siebel Web Engine service in the object manager. Most of the work takes place in the Siebel Web Engine (SWE); the Web server plug-in mostly maintains the session and functions as a communication intermediary. Network communication between the Web server plug-in and the object manager is through SISNAPI, a TCP/IP-based Siebel Communication protocol that provides a security and compression mechanism.

The Siebel Web Engine runs as an object manager service called the Web Engine Interface Service. This service implements most components of the Siebel Web Engine, deploying an interface between the Siebel plug-in on the Web server and the object manager. From the perspective of the Siebel plug-in, the SWE interface service provides processing for incoming HTTP requests bearing the SWE prefix, and generates HTTP responses. From the object manager's perspective, it provides a user interface in its OM interactions.

Applets and views are made available to the Web by associating a set of HTML templates, which is done using Siebel Tools. At run time, when an applet needs to be rendered, the SWE obtains the information defining the applet, the appropriate data for the various the applet controls or list columns, and the HTML template; it then combines them to generate the final Web page that is then sent to the browser.

Applet Web templates are defined and laid out in Siebel Tools using the Applet Web Template and Applet Web Template Item object types and the Web Applet Designer. View Web templates are defined using the View Web Template and View Web Template Item object types.