9 Oracle Beehive Platform Development Concepts

Oracle Beehive enables developers to build and integrate applications with the platform through its Web services interface, Oracle Beehive Web Services. This module provides high-level details on Oracle Beehive Web Services, and includes the following topics:

• Overview of Oracle Beehive Web Services

• Benefits of Oracle Beehive Web Services

• Building Custom Solutions with Oracle Beehive Web Services

Overview of Oracle Beehive Web Services

Oracle Beehive Web Services provides an abstract representation of Oracle Beehive data and metadata. It provides Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files, enabling developers to invoke its services from custom applications through open standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.2 and Web Services Security (WS-Security), which is based on SOAP and includes Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML).

With Oracle Beehive Web Services, developers can build and integrate Web applications with Oracle Beehive in any environment that can generate a proxy implementation from WSDLs, including non-OC4J environments such as Microsoft .NET. To build such applications, developers can user whatever development tools that suit their needs, such as Oracle JDeveloper, Eclipse IDE, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Benefits of Oracle Beehive Web Services

Oracle Beehive Web Services provides the following benefits:

• Shields developers from the complexities of the underlying Oracle Beehive data model by exposing only relevant data objects

• Provides Web services that expose user-focused methods

• Provides data accessors, manipulators, and collaborative actions through relevant types and methods

• Provides a unified abstraction of the Oracle Beehive collaboration model and system functionality

• Supports solutions that interoperate with and consume Oracle Beehive services without requiring them to be on the same application server

Building Custom Solutions with Oracle Beehive Web Services

With Oracle Beehive Web Services, developers can build a variety of custom solutions on the Oracle Beehive platform. These solutions can leverage the full range of the platform's collaborative offerings including its entities (users, groups, artifacts, workspaces, and so forth) and functionality (time management, e-mail, content management, instant messaging, notification, presence, and so forth).

Examples of custom solutions that can be implemented with Oracle Beehive Web Services include:

• A consumer-oriented solution that automatically creates workspaces whenever customers contact a company's customer service department to report issues. Each workspace remains open and accessible until its associated issue is resolved.

• A contact management application that imports a user's contacts and their contact information from a spreadsheet or comma-delimited text file to the user's Oracle Beehive personal address book.

• A self-service workspace solution that enables users to create, list, and join workspaces through a designated Web page. When creating workspaces, the solution enables users to specify new workspace members. When a user requests to join a workspace, the solution initiates a custom workflow that sends a notification to the coordinator for the workspace. If the coordinator approves the request, the workflow adds the user to the workspace and notifies the user.

• A solution that graphically represents the relationships between Oracle Beehive artifacts based on one or more attributes, such as entity ID. This solution would enable users to intuitively traverse the relationships of all of the artifacts to which they have access.