10 Oracle Beehive Platform Development Concepts

Oracle Beehive enables developers to build and integrate applications with the platform using the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK). This module provides high-level details on the Oracle BDK, and includes the following topics:

• Overview of the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

• Benefits of the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

• Building Custom Solutions with the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

Overview of the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

The Oracle BDK provides Oracle Beehive RESTful Web Services, which consists of APIs that enable developers to build Web applications for Oracle Beehive deployments. These APIs are implemented with the principals of REST, Representational State Transfer. RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web services are Web services that are implemented with the principles of REST:

• API URLs point to the resource being used rather than a generic method endpoint.

• Requests use standard HTTP verbs for simplified CRUD methods:

  • Create, POST

  • Update, POST

  • Retrieve, GET

  • Delete, DELETE

• Create and Update data is sent as a POST body (JSON and XML).

• Every request returns a full (or at least standard) representation of the object created, updated, or retrieved.

Benefits of the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

The Oracle BDK provides the following benefits:

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

• Provides RESTful 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 the Oracle Beehive Development Kit (BDK)

With the Oracle BDK, 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 the Oracle BDK 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.

• 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.