WebCenter Portal enables you to create federated portals, which include
remotely distributed resources such as remote portlets. These remote
resources are collected and brought together at runtime by a portal web
application, called a
producer, to another portal web application,
called a
consumer, which presents the federated portal to end users.
Unlike a non-federated local portal, the individual remote parts of a federated
portal can be maintained, updated, and released independently without redeploying
the consumer portal in which they are surfaced. Using the
JSF Portlet Bridge,
any JSF artifact can be published to remote portal environments and be federated
along with any traditional portlet.
Federated portals are:
- Distributed: Portlets are deployed on remote systems
across the enterprise.
- Decoupled: The portal and its portlets do not depend
upon one another. In most cases, remote portlets can be maintained and
deployed separately from the federated portal.
- Collaborative: Remote portlets can communicate and
share data.
- Plug-and-Play: Programming is usually not required
to consume remote portlets.
- Standards-based: WebCenter Portal's federated
portals are built upon open standards, such as WSRP, SOAP, WSDL, SAML,
UDDI, and WS-Security.
Producers and consumers are the basic parts of a federated portal. Both
producers and consumers implement a web services layer that enables them
to communicate. This web services layer allows producers to offer portlets
to consumers on remote systems. Consumers bring these remote, distributed
portlets together at runtime. The remote portlets themselves can be developed
and maintained by different groups of people. If one remote portlet on a
producer is changed, other portlets within a consumer that consumes the
updated portlet are not typically affected. Furthermore, the look and feel
of a remote portlet synchronized with the federated portal
in which it resides. To end users of federated portals, the remote portlets
are indistinguishable from local ones.