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Click a letter in the glossary index. Or use the Page Down key, the Page Up key, the arrow keys, or the scroll bar to navigate. Please contact us if you encounter a relevant term that was not defined in this glossary.
- A -
- applet
- An application written in Java to run within a Web browser that is compatible with Java.
- application programming interface (API)
- The verbs and environment that exist at the application level to support a particular system software product. A set of well-defined programming interfaces (that is, entry points, calling parameters, and return values) by which one software program uses the services of another.
- authentication
- The process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be.
- authorization
- The granting of authority, which includes granting access based on access rights.
- B -
- B2B
- Business to Business
- B2C
- Business to Consumer
- BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS)
- A complete solution for building and deploying scalable, high-performance e-Commerce sites with personalized content delivery based on user profiles and business rules. The WLCS product family includes the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server and the BEA WebLogic Commerce Servere Components.
- See BEA WebLogic Personalization Server (WLPS)
- See BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components
- BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components
- An e-Commerce development kit including more than 80 pre-built, pre-tested Java and EJB 1.1 components designed to provide most of the functionality of essential e-business. Out-of-the-box pluggable components such as customer, session, shopping advisor, order, invoice, inventory, and trouble ticket. Together with a robust set of foundation classes, the Commerce Server provides up to 80% of common e-business functions. During run-time, these Java and EJB components serve as the engine for an e-Commerce site. These same components can be extended and modified via a UML model as needed for unique e-business scenarios.
- BEA WebLogic Personalization Server (WLPS)
- A set of programming code, tools, and utilities for building e-Commerce applications and Web sites that feature customized content delivery based on user profiles and business rules. The Personalization Server is one of two products featured in the WebLogic Commerce Server product offering; the other is the WebLogic Commerce Server Components.
- BEA WebLogic Server (WLS)
- The engine that runs the applications that drive e-commerce. Application servers are software programs that act as go-betweens and service enablers linking end-user browsers via the Internet with the back-end systems and databases of e-businesses. WLS is a Web application server that provides an industrial-strength set of services for building and running e-commerce applications using the Java language and Sun's J2EE platform, including EJB components. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server components and personalization server run on WLS.
- See BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components
- C -
- content advisor
- A key Personalization Server component that allows a J2EE Web developer to personalize content for users of a Web site or a personalized application. The content advisor includes JSP tags/tag library and a content advisor EJB stateless session bean that accesses the core personalization services: Foundation, User profile management, rules service, and content management The tag library and session bean contains personalization logic to access these services, sequences personalization actions, and returns personalized content to the Web site. This architecture makes the details of the Personalization engine optionally transparent to the JSP developer; only knowledge of the content advisor JSP tags is required. For more advanced JSP development, access to the underlying content advisor EJB and all of its features is available.The content advisor can be used to deliver any type of personalized content either in a portal or simply as standard HTML output.
- content manager
- A key Personalization Server component that provides access to content via both tags and EJBs. The content management tags allow a JSP developer to receive an enumeration of content objects by querying the content database directly using a search expression syntax. The content management tools are designed to be used with with the rules manager and rules services, user profiles, and property set manager to create personalized content delivery on an e-Commerce site. The primary interface to the functionality of the content management component is the ContentManager session bean.
- D -
- design pattern
- Solutions to common design problems encapsulated in a structured format. These patterns are essentially the articulation of rules and forms that have proved useful in the context of object-oriented application design components. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server components interact with each other using built-in, industry standard design patterns to solve a wide range of business problems. The use of proven design patterns results in a better business model, lowered cost of development and maintenance, and faster time-to-market.
- See also Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- distributed application
- An application that is separated into two or more parts (such as a client and a server) on different computers that communicate through a network. e-Commerce applications are, by nature, distributed applications.
- E -
- Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
- A server component architecture for writing Java Server components.
- An API specification for building scalable, distributed, component-based, multitiered applications. EJBs leverage and extend the JavaBeans component model to provide a rich, object-oriented transactional environment for creating e-Commerce applications.
- See also Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
- entity bean
- A long-lived bean that represents data in an underlying data store and can be shared by multiple clients.
- extensible markup language (XML)
- A tagging language used in some of thePersonal Server internal run-time components.
- F -
(No terms starting with the letter "F")
- G -
- group profile
- An aspect of user management, a group is an organizational tool that can collect users or system groups. Each group has one associated profile, which can be partitioned into property sets.
- The user management system provides a means of profile attribute inheritance, from group profile to user profile. Upon request for a particular user attribute, the User Management client can provide a group name, prescribing the group profile.
- See also user management
- See also user profile
- H -
(No terms starting with the letter "H")
- I -
(No terms starting with the letter "I")
- J -
- JAR files (.jar)
- Java ARchive files. A file format used for aggregating many files into one file.
- See also Java
- Java
- An object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. A "write once, run anywhere" programming language.
- Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
- An environment for developing and deploying distributed, scaleable, enterprise-level applications designed to run on networks, the Internet, and the Web. The J2EE platform consists of a set of services, APIs, and protocols that provide the functionality for developing multitiered, Web-based applications. EJB technology is a key aspect of J2EE. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server components and personalization server are based on J2EE and EJB.
- See also Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
- Java Server Pages (JSP)
- A J2EE component for generating dynamic web page content.
- Java Naming and Directory Service (JNDI)
- A protocol standard for looking up objects and resources.
- K -
(No terms starting with the letter "K")
- L -
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
- e-Commerce sites can leverage the WebLogic Personalization Server user management tools to offer self-registration for new users. For sites with large collections of existing uses in the form of customers or employees, the WebLogic Realm support can provide added convenience and security through products like LDAP 3.0 servers. Information such as the customers' billing address and accounts status, and an employee's date of hire and benefits selections are examples of data that reside in a corporate database or an LDAP server. In most cases this information is well known and modeled as an EJB.
- M -
(No terms starting with the letter "M")
- N -
(No terms starting with the letter "N")
- O -
- object model
- The model that represents as objects the overall object-oriented design of an application or system. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server components are provided both as a run-time application and as an object model. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components are provided both as a run-time e-Commerce engine and as a UML object model. Java developers can use the UML model as a basis for extending and modifying existing WLCS components.
- See also Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- P -
- personalization advisor
- In the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server (WLPS), the personalization advisor is a stateless session bean that gives personalized advice and recommends content. It can retrieve any type of content in a Document Management system and display it with a JSP page or servlet. The personalization advisor ties together the core personalization server services in WLPS (user profile management, rules service, content management, and the WLPS foundation). The Personalization Advisor gathers information from the user profile provided by the user management component, submits that information to the rules service, runs the resulting queries against the document management system used in the content management component, and returns the content to the JSP developer.
- The personalization advisor component includes a JSP tag library and a personalization advisor EJB stateless session bean that accesses the core personalization services. JSP developers can take advantage of the personalization engine using the JSP tags, and EJB developers can access the underlying session EJB and its features via the public Personalization Advisor bean interface
- personalization server
- See BEA WebLogic Personalization Server (WLPS)
- portal
- A window into a network of information and services on the World Wide Web. This can be any kind of network such as the internet or intranet. The Personalization Server provides tools for creating portals and portlets.
- See also portlet
- portlet
- From the end-user point-of-view, a portlet is a specialized content area that occupies a small 'window' in the portal page. For example, a portlet can contain travel itineraries, business news, local weather, or sports scores. The user can personalize the content, appearance, and position of the portlet according to the profile preferences set by the administrator and group to which the user belongs. The user can also edit, maximize, minimize, or float the portlet window.
- From a server application point-of-view, a portlet is a content component implemented as a JSP that defines the static and dynamic content for a specific content subject (weather, business news, etc.) in the portal page. The portlet JSP generates dynamic HTML content from the server by accessing data entities or content adapters implemented using the J2EE platform. The Portlet JSP then displays the content in the portal.
- The Personaliztion Server provides tools for creating portals and portlets.
- See also portal
- properties
- See property set management
- property set management
- Property set management is a key aspect of the Personalization Server that involves defining property sets associated with various components and grouping properties into these property sets. Properties represent the attributes of an object. For instance, "backgroundColor" is a property on an HTML page. Property sets serve as a name space for properties so that properties can be conveniently grouped and so that multiple properties with the same name can be defined. When property sets and properties are defined, they can be applied to users and groups, HTTP sessions and HTTP requests (wrapped by a ConfigurableEntity component), or content accessible from the Content Management system. The property set management tools support creating User/Group, Session, and Request types of property sets. A Content property set type also exists for Content Management, but Content property sets cannot be created through the Personalization Server tools.
- For instance, let's say a portal Web site requires the property "backgroundColor" for a user. The site developers want users to be able to specify different background colors for each of their portals. By creating "portalA" and "portalB" property sets, the property "backgroundColor" can exist for both portal A and portal B. While the two "backgroundColor" properties have the same name, they could have the same or different definitions. A property definition defines the type of the property value (ex. text, integer, date/time), whether the property is multi-valued or single-valued, and whether the property value is restricted to a certain set of values, and a default value for a property.
- property sets
- See property set management
- Q -
(No terms starting with the letter "Q")
- R -
- rules editor
- A key component of the Personalization Server, the rules editor is an HTML based editor for creating a structured system of business rules. The rules are used along with user profiles to personalize the content delivery of an e-Commerce site. The syntax of the rules is rules engine-independent. The output of the rules editor is a RuleSheet, stored in an XML format. The rules editor is used as follows:
To create, open, edit, save, and delete RuleSheets.
Within a Rulesheet, to create, edit, and delete Rules. There are two types of rules: ContentSelector and Classifier.
Within a Rule, create, edit, and delete individual Rule conditions.
See also RuleSheet
- RuleSheet
- A document used to save rules. The RuleSheet is the output of the Personalization Server rules editor. Each RuleSheet may have 0 or more Rules. There are two types of rules: ContentSelector and Classifier. Rulesheets rely on property sets to provide the properties they use to evaluate user and group profiles.
- See also rules editor
- S -
- session bean
- A non-persistent object that implements some business logic running on the server. A session bean can be thought of as a logical extension of the client that runs on the server. A session bean is not shared among multiple clients.
- Smart Generator
- A UML model-to-EJB code generator used in the BEA WebLogic Commerce Server components development process. The WLCS Smart Generator reads an intermediate file (*.tast model definition file) and creates a set of classes that implements these objects with reference to the Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1 Specification. Smart Generator provides the most comprehensive EJB code generation in the industry. The generated EJB code that is optimized for the high performance demands of interactive e-commerce Web applications. The code is based on input from industry-leading persistence experts and systems integrators. This frees up developers from having to know the details of EJB and handles many of the laborious tasks of creating access methods and handling containment of references is automatically handled. Round-trip engineering is provided
- The WLCS Smart Generator also uses intelligent algorithms to generate sensible naming for collections and methods. In addition, it generates documentation for these classes using the same intelligent naming scheme. Because the Smart Generator embeds code markers, it is possible for developers to add the business logic and then resynchronize those changes with the model.
- T -
(No terms starting with the letter "T")
- U -
- Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- An object modeling language supported by tools like Rational Rose and WebGain/Tendril StructureBuilder for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the components of a software system, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. Although UML itself is simply a modeling language or notation, it is ideal for iterative object-oriented development such as EJB application construction and revision. The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components are provided as both a run-time e-Commerce engine and as a UML model. Java developers can use the UML model as a basis for extending and modifying existing WLCS components.
- See also object model
- user management
- A set of JSP tags, EJBs, and tools that facilitate the creation and persistence of user and group profile properties. It provides access to user profile information within in the BEA Webogic Personalization Server. The user manager also provides user-authentication mechanisms and user-to-group associations.
- user profile
- A sets of name/value attribute pairs associated with a user or a group. User profiles are a key aspect of user management in the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server.
- See also user management
- V -
(No terms starting with the letter "V")
- W -
- WebLogic Commerce Server components
- See BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) components
- WebLogic Server (WLS)
- See BEA WebLogic Server (WLS)
- X -
- XML
- See extensible markup language (XML)
- Y -
(No terms starting with the letter "Y")
- Z -
(No terms starting with the letter "Z")
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