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BEA WebLogic Portal

BEA WebLogic Components

Please take some time to read the BEAWebLogic Commerce Servers Release Notes to find information about new features added in this release, the product name, fixed and known problems, supported platforms, and location of product documentation.

Note: There may have been software and documentation updates since this CD was cut, and more recent Release Notes may be available. Please check online at e-docs.beasys.com for the latest information.

BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers is a suite of all-Java e-commerce components:

• Pre-built and pre-tested for rapid customization and deployment

• The Portal framework enables personalization by group or individual

• The Component suite provides customizable functionality for Web-based e-commerce.

BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers' all-Java portal and components are designed to run in a standards-based e-commerce transaction platform, such as industry-leading BEA WebLogic Server.

All of the functionality in this release is the same as that of release 1.7. This release incorporates software and documentation fixes as listed below.

• In Commerce Server 1.7.1 (Components):

  • The method call order.getItems() has been fixed. It returns a collection of SmartHandles to Items.

  • The ShippingMethod components have been modified. Users may now set a ShippingCostCalculationPolicy more flexibly, using the setShippingCostCalculatorPolicy method.

  • In the StakeHolder entity bean, the methods getPrimaryAddress , setPrimaryAddress , and getNamedAddress have been defined. In addition, setPrimaryAddress() now takes an additional argument (strings ).

• In the Commerce Server 1.7.1 Documentation:

  • Several steps in the Technical Tour have been clarified.

• In the Personalization Server 1.7.1 Documentation:

  • Several steps in the Portal Administrator's Guide have been clarified.

  • A code sample in the Portlet Developer's Guide was fixed.

Installation Update

The BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers installer uses the following product names:

BEA WebLogic Application Solutions, containing:

1. BEA WebLogic Personalization Server 1.7

2. BEA WebLogic Commerce Server 1.7

However, the product and product component names you will find in the packaging, installer, dialogs, registry entries, Start Menu, and documentation differ slightly. Use the mapping given in the following table to avoid confusion. In future releases all the package and documentation names will align.

Table 0-1 BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers Product Family

Family and Product Names	Package and Documentation Names	License Strings
BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers (Family name)	BEA WebLogic Application Solutions BEA WebLogic Application Components BEA WebLogicAC WLAC	(see individual product elements below)
BEA WebLogic Personalization Server	BEA WebLogic Portal 1.7	BEA WebLogic Portal
BEA WebLogic Commerce Server	BEA WebLogic Components 1.7	BEA WebLogic Components

Read across from left to right. The actual release names are on the left - these are the names being used in press, marketing, and sales materials. The second column contains names that customers may see, which are exactly equivalent to the corresponding names in the first column. Users may see these names used in the documentation, splash screen, installation program, and in the installed directory structure.

Users should also note the following:

BEA WebLogic Commerce Server 1.7 (also Components 1.7 - see table above) includes the former Theory Center's JumpStart eBusiness Smart Components 1.6. There are still references to the original product names of "Theory Center JumpStart," "Theory Center eBusiness Smart Components," and "eBSC" in the code, parts of the Javadoc API and other documentation, and in white papers. The old names will be deprecated and updated in future releases.

You will need a 30-day evaluation license key in order to complete the installation of the product after the download.

1. Right-click on the link in the evaluation download page: "WebLogicACLicense.xml" and select Save Target As.

2. Save the file in a local directory you will remember, e.g. C:\TEMP , or in the default directory where the installation program will look for it (if the directory exists), C:\WebLogicAC\license .

3. When you unzip the product download and run the Setup.exe , the installation program will ask for the location of this license file. If you cannot locate it or if it has been saved incorrectly, the installation program will not be able to continue.

There are additional directions for installing a permanent license manually in the Installation Guide, under the topic "Licensing WebLogic Application Solutions". The Installation Guide is available at http://e-docs.beasys.com/wlac/install/index.htm.

The WebLogic Personalization Server (Portal) includes a "Portal Admin Tool" which is accessible when the server is running by selecting WebLogic Application Solutions > Examples > Portal Administration Tool from the Start Menu Programs menu.

The default log-in for the Portal admin tool is as follows:

User Name	system
Password	weblogic

Note: This log-in is not to be confused with the administrator password you may have set for the WebLogic Server itself.

The Cloudscape database that ships with the product is for demo purposes only and is not a multi-user database. Its performance is not representative of BEA WebLogic Components performance.

To improve the speed response of the bundled example portals, and experience WebLogic Components performance at production standards, switch from the default Cloudscape database to Oracle.

Instructions for switching deployment sets to run the example portals under Oracle 8.0.5 (NT and Solaris) can be found in the Installation Guide.

Generalized information about deploying your own component solutions on Oracle can also be found in the Deployment Sets Overview in the Deploying WebLogic Components Using Bean-Managed Persistence section of "Using WebLogic Components."

The following table lists the supported and required software and platforms for BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers.

Table 0-2 Supported Platforms, Environments, and Software Requirements

Requirement type	Specification, or solution(s) supported
Platform and OS	Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 5, on Intel Solaris 2.7 on SPARC
Java environment1	NT: JDK 1.1.7B, JDK 1.2.2-001 Solaris: JDK 1.1.7 Production, JDK 1.2.1-04 For production implementations1, here are the certified configurations under NT and Solaris: Windows NT: t JDK 1.2.2-001 t JDK 1.1.7B Solaris: t JDK 1.1.7 Production t JDK 1.2.1-04
Application server	WebLogic Server 4.5.1 with Service Pack 4 (SP4) is required for development and production deployments. SP4 is available online from BEA WebLogic at http://www.weblogic.com/download/nfw3aut.html A file, weblogic/lib/weblogic451sp4.jar , is included with the portal installation and is referenced in the startPortal scripts. This installs only the minimum configuration necessary to run the reference implementations "out of the box." The complete SP4 would still be needed for production deployments.
Web browser / client	MS Internet Explorer 4.0 and above Netscape Communicator 4.5 and above
DBMS / JDBC driver	Cloudscape 2.0.1 (evaluation copy included) Oracle 8.0.5 / thin client
UML modeler	Rational Rose 98 or 98i is required for the use of the Rose Add-In, Rose UML, and SmartGenerator (WebLogic Components 1.7)

¹Keep checking our downloads site at www.beasys.com/download.html for the latest information about product support in various Java environments.

If you already have Theory Center JumpStart 1.6.1or BEA JumpStart 1.6.1 installed on your system, there are very few considerations to keep in mind. In general, Theory Center components and BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers are installed in different directories and can run in parallel.

Following are the areas to take some care:

1. JDK

   JDK 1.2 (SDK 1.2) is required for BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers only for the purpose of running the My BuyBeans.com example portal against the Cloudscape database that ships with it.

   The JDK 1.1.7B you already have installed for JumpStart 1.6.1 is still the preferred Java production environment for Oracle implementations of WebLogic Commerce Servers.

2. SmartGenerator

   If you have been working on a model in Rational Rose, the SmartGenerator that will be invoked from the Rose Add-in will be the improved version. This should not affect your work.

3. Components

   The components themselves are unchanged from v1.6.1.

4. Deployment Descriptors

   The deployment set for Oracle 8.1.5 has been removed in this release. Please refer to the Installation Guide for detailed information about deploying the example portal My BuyBeans.com with Oracle 8.0.5.

This section describes limitations in the current BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers release and includes possible workarounds, where applicable.

Note: The table below lists a CR (Change Request) number for each problem. Refer to this number to conveniently track the solution as the problems are resolved.

Please contact BEA Technical Support for assistance in tracking any unresolved problems. For contact information, see the section Contacting BEA Customer Support.

• The portal has not been certified with WebLogic running on Windows NT as a service.

• The portal has not been certified with WebLogic running with clustering.

  1	CR173	Adding a redundant group throws java.rmi.UnexpectedException
  	Problem	Adding a group with the same name as an existing group throws a java.rmi.UnexpectedException . The exception is thrown when the previously-existing EJB (the one whose existence should cause a CreateException) is passivated.
  	Platform	All
  	Workaround	Avoid using a group name that could conflict with a user's name.

  2	CR174	Adding a group with same name as a user throws javax.ejb.CreateException
  	Problem	Adding a group with the same name as an existing user (or vice versa) throws a javax.ejb.CreateException . The profile entity is shared by both groups and users, so they need to have unique names. This will be addressed in a future release.
  	Platform	All
  	Workaround	Avoid using a group name that could conflict with a user's name.

  3	CR220	HTML special characters in HTML form input text fields may cause malformed HTML
  	Problem	Users entering data in text fields in HTML forms that contain special HTML characters such as <, >, &, and " may cause portal pages that display this data to have malformed HTML.
  	Platform	All
  	Workaround	Avoid using HTML special characters in HTML form input text fields.

  4	CR88	FileNotFoundException thrown when content URL JSP page does not exist
  	Problem	A FileNotFoundException is thrown when a content URL of a portlet does not exist. In this case, the portal framework should redirect to an error page. This problem occurs with an jsp:included page that can't be found. The server prints the stack trace, swallows the FileNotFoundException and continues on its way. This bug will be fixed in a future release.
  	Platform	All
  	Workaround	None.

My BuyBeans.com Demo Limitation

Note: The following limitation is attributable to a bug in the example demo My BuyBeans.com, not in the components themselves.

1	CR421-B	Wrong item added to shopping cart
	Problem	When you are looking at the detail about an item, if instead of clicking "Add to Cart" you go to the detail page for a related item (one of the cross-sell links appearing in the same pane), and then you click "Add to Cart" (for the new item currently displayed), the wrong item is added to the cart.
	Platform	All
	Workaround	None. This will be fixed in a future release.

JavaServer Page 1.0 Limitation

Start-up lag occurs on first request for a JavaServer Page (JSP).

Note: To address speed issues, see also the Performance Release Note above.

The BEA WebLogic Portal includes many JavaServer Pages (JSP) that are used to support the framework and the portal demos. Due to limitations in the JSP 1.0 specification, a JSP page must be delivered as source and can not be delivered compiled into its JSP implementation class with deployment information. This results in a start-up lag that occurs when a JSP page delivered as source receives the first request.

The JSP 1.1 final release specification addresses this issue in section 1.4.2 Compiling JSP. A future version of the BEA WebLogic Portal will support JSP 1.1 and this issue will be resolved.

If you use the Portal Administration Tool to add a portlet from the Acme demo portal or the My BeanBeans demo portal to your own portal, make sure you copy the portlet JSPs and images from their respective web site directories to your portal's working directory. See Creating a Portal Web Site section in the Portal Administration guide for more information.

Documentation for this product is available from the following locations:

• On the BEA Web site. From the BEA Home page at http://www.beasys.com, click on Product Documentation or go directly to the on-line Product Documentation page at http://e-docs.beasys.com.

To access easy-to-print PDFs, open the WebLogic Commerce Servers documentation Home page, click the PDF files button and select the document you want to view or print. If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from the Adobe Web site at http://www.adobe.com/.

Your feedback on the BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers documentation is important to us. Send us e-mail at docsupport@beasys.com if you have questions or comments. Your comments will be reviewed directly by the BEA professionals who create and update the WebLogic Commerce Servers documentation.

In your e-mail message, please indicate that you are using the documentation for the BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers 1.0 release.

If you have any questions about this version of BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers, or if you have problems installing and running BEA WebLogic Commerce Servers, contact BEA Customer Support through BEA WebSupport at www.beasys.com. You can also contact Customer Support by using the contact information provided on the Customer Support Card, which is included in the product package.

When contacting Customer Support, be prepared to provide the following information:

• Your name, e-mail address, phone number, and fax number

• Your company name and company address

• Your machine type and licensing information

• The name and version of the product you are using

• A description of the problem and the content of pertinent error messages.

Note About Evaluation Support

If you are evaluating this product and it is your first 30-day evaluation, BEA Systems is pleased to offer technical support through its BEA WebEvalNET at http://www.beasys.com/evalnet/.

The first time you need technical support, complete the WebEvalNET registration form to receive a Login ID and other BEA WebEvalNET information. In most cases, the BEA EvalNET team of support engineers will address your technical issues within one business day.