Integration Web Services are the building blocks of the Enterprise Web. In the Plumtree Corporate Portal, services can integrate or communicate with virtually any application, resource or Internet service. The Plumtree Enterprise Web Development Kit (EDK) includes interfaces for all Plumtree services, allowing external developers to create and implement applications that provide portal users with essential resources.
Plumtree Corporate Portal 5.0 is designed to provide users with all the resources they need through custom applications and a range of extensibility components. The following portal objects can be implemented as remote services using Java or .NET:
Portlets integrate remote applications and present users with access to specific functionality within a portal page. Adaptive portlets can be used to create a coordinated portal page comprised of cross-platform services that talk to multiple back-ends.
Crawlers enable the portal to scan new content repositories to index in the Knowledge Directory.
Search can be extended in a variety of ways, including adding to the portal search index, implementing Web services to access content in other repositories, customizing the search UI, and adding portal search to remote services.
Authentication Sources allow the portal to synchronize with existing databases of users and groups, and authenticate users against external systems. Profile Sources import user information from source repositories, map the information to Plumtree properties, and store it in the Plumtree database and Search Server. This data can be used to populate User Profiles in the portal.
These components work together to build a complete, seamlessly integrated portal, as explained in the sections that follow. All Web services have access to settings in the Plumtree database. These settings are detailed on the following pages:
Plumtree Settings Model: The Plumtree database stores a range of settings. These settings can be used by portlets and Web services to provide personalized functionality and seamless access to back-end systems.
Portal Settings (Headers): Plumtree uses a group of custom headers to communicate system and user configuration variables. These headers include information that can be used by services.
Note: There is a one-to-one relationship between services and the Web Service objects that represent them in the portal. The word service (lowercase) refers to the code that resides on a remote server machine, including portlets, crawlers, search services, authentication services, and profile services. The term Web Service (initial caps) refers to the object in the portal that represents the service code on the remote server machine. The Web Service objects in the portal include Web Service - Authentication, Web Service - Crawler, Web Service - Search, Web Service - Profile, and Web Service - Remote Portlet. Each Web Service object can be associated with multiple portal objects (Portlets, Crawlers, etc.).
For a full listing of development topics, see the table of contents. For a full list of interfaces and methods, see the EDK API documentation, available on the Developer Center (http://devcenter.plumtree.com).
Next: Portlets