Building Blocks

At the next level of Desktop APIs are the building block providers. Building block providers are those providers that are public and that you can extend to create new providers. The other providers, such as bookmark and mailcheck, are not public and are not extensible.

The building block providers in the figure are all the specific content providers (leaves) and specific container (presentation) providers that Portal Server software supplies. All these public building block classes are based upon the base PAPI classes.

As a developer, you can extend the Java classes for some of the building block providers. An administrator can then use your extended classes to define channels for end user consumption.