About This Guide

This guide explains how to use the Sun^TM ONE Portal Server 6.0 software APIs. Sun ONE Portal Server provides a platform to create portals for your organization's integrated data, knowledge management, and applications. The Sun ONE Portal Server platform offers a complete infrastructure solution for building and deploying all types of portals, including business-to-business, business-to-employee, and business-to-consumer.

This preface includes the following sections:

• Who Should Read This Book
• What You Need to Know
• How This Book is Organized
• Document Conventions Used in This Guide
• Where to Find Related Information
• Where to Find This Guide Online

Who Should Read This Book

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You should read this book if you are responsible for customizing and extending the Sun ONE Portal Server APIs.

What You Need to Know

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This book assumes that you are familiar with the following products:

• Sun^TM ONE Directory Server
• iPlanet^TM Directory Server Access Management Edition
• Sun^TM ONE Web Server

This book assumes you already know the basics of:

• The Solaris Operating Environment and UNIX command-line utilities and administrative tasks
• One or more of the following programming languages: Java, C, XML, and HTML

How This Book is Organized

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This book contains the following chapters:

• About This Guide (this chapter)
• Chapter 1 "Introduction to the APIs"

This chapter provides an introduction to the Sun ONE Portal Server APIs.

• Chapter 2 "Using Provider API (PAPI)"

This chapter provides an introduction to the base PAPI interfaces, classes, and exceptions, and includes instructions for implementing a custom provider by extending the PAPI.

• Chapter 3 "Using Leaf Providers"

This chapter provides an introduction to the Sun ONE Portal Server leaf providers and includes samples customizations to methods in the leaf provider classes.

• Chapter 4 "Using the Container Providers"

This chapter provides an introduction to the Sun ONE Portal Server leaf providers and includes samples customizations to methods in the leaf provider classes and instructions for developing a custom ContainerProvider.

• Chapter 5 "Search Engine Robot"

This chapter describes the Search Engine Robot and the application programming interface (API) used to create plug-in robot application functions (RAFs).

• Chapter 6 "Using the SOIF API to Work with SOIF Objects"

This chapter describes the use of the search engine SOIF API to work with SOIF objects in C.

• Chapter 7 "Using the RDM API to Access the Search Engine and Database in C"

This chapter describes the use of the Search Engine RDM API to access the Search Engine and its database.

• Chapter 8 "Using Java to Access the Search Engine Database"

This chapter describes how to submit queries and add entries to the Search Engine database by using the Java programming language.

• Chapter 9 "Localizing Sun ONE Portal Server"

This chapter provides instructions for localizing the customizable parts of Sun ONE Portal Server software.

Document Conventions Used in This Guide

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Monospaced Font

Monospaced font is used for any text that appears on the computer screen or text that you should type. It is also used for file names, distinguished names, functions, and examples.

Bold Monospaced Font

Bold monospaced font is used to represent text within a code example that you should type. For example, you might see something like this:

BaseDir/SUNWps/bin/dpadmin add -p parent -u amadmin_dn -w password -d node dp-locale.xml

Italicized Font

Italicized font is used to represent text that you enter using information that is unique to your installation (for example, variables). It is used for server paths and names and account IDs.

Command-Line Prompts

Command-line prompts (for example, % for a C-Shell, or $ for a Korn, or Bourne shell) are not displayed in the examples. Depending on which operating system environment you are using, you will see a variety of different command-line prompts. However, you should enter the command as it appears in the document unless specifically noted otherwise.

Where to Find Related Information

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In addition to this guide, Sun ONE Portal Server comes with supplementary information for administrators as well as documentation for developers. Use the following URL to see all the Sun ONE Portal Server documentation:

http://docs.sun.com/prod/s1portalsrv

Use this book in conjunction with the Javadocs at http://hostname:port/URI/javadocs. Listed below are the additional documents that are available:

• Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0 Installation Guide
• Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0 Migration Guide
• Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0 Administrator's Guide
• Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0 Desktop Customization Guide

Where to Find This Guide Online

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You can find the Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0 Developer's Guide online in PDF and HTML formats. This book can be found at the following URL:

http://docs.sun.com/prod/s1portalsrv