1 What's in this Guide?

In a world of increasingly interactive and responsive web applications, WebLogic Portals need to be designed and updated to keep pace with users' expectations. Browser-based development technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, and JSON, web-based APIs for accessing data, architectural patterns such as REST, and client-side development toolkits such as Dojo, enable web developers to create web applications that approach the responsiveness of desktop applications.

This guide is for WLP developers who want to integrate these client-side technologies into their portals. This chapter introduces the client-side portal development topics and technologies that are discussed in this guide.

• Section 1.1, "The Disc Framework"

• Section 1.2, "Toolkit Integration"

• Section 1.3, "Portlet Publishing"

• Section 1.4, "The REST API"

• Section 1.5, "The Dynamic Visitor Tools"

1.1 The Disc Framework

Disc (Dynamic Interface SCripting) is a client-side JavaScript framework that handles the asynchronous updating of portlets, portlet events, and the retrieval of portal context objects.

To get started using Disc, see Chapter 3, "The WLP Disc Framework"

1.2 Toolkit Integration

Client-side developers using WLP can use their favorite toolkits for DHTML and JavaScript browser programming. Dojo, for instance, works well for portlet development and for extending the WLP rendering framework.

To get started using Dojo for WLP client-side development, see Chapter 4, "Configuring JavaScript Libraries in a Portal Web Project"

1.3 Portlet Publishing

Traditionally, portlets have been confined to use within a portal application. This traditional model required an application server running a portal container to surface portlets. Portlet Publishing makes portlets available to any web application over HTTP and allows portlets to be surfaced in any web page. With Portlet Publishing, for example, you can render portlets within a Struts or Spring application, or any other non-portal web page.

For detailed information on publishing your portlets, see Chapter 5, "Portlet Publishing".

1.4 The REST API

WebLogic Portal provides a set of web-based, REST-style APIs for retrieving, modifying, creating and updating portal data dynamically from the client.

For detailed information on the REST API, see Chapter 7, "The WebLogic Portal REST API"

1.5 The Dynamic Visitor Tools

To get a feel for the possibilities of client-side portal development, we recommend that you run the Dynamic Visitor Tools (DVT). The DVT uses the Disc and REST APIs to create a rich, interactive web application.

For detailed information on running the DVT, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Portal Development Guide for Oracle WebLogic Portal.