Oracle WebCenter Portal offers a suite of productivity features that accellerate the development process and dramatically speed changes to an active site so that business owners can respond rapidly to changing conditions.

WebCenter Portal Propagation Tool: Moves portal metadata from the staging to the production environment. In practice, these two environments remain identical until changes are made to the staged portal. When the changes are tested and approved, an administrator uses the propagation tool to "push" the changes to the production server. This transfer does not require the production server to be restarted.

Round-trip Development: Refers to features and techniques that allow you to retrieve resources from a deployed, runtime portal back to JDeveloper for maintenance or enhancement. After modifying a resource in JDeveloper, you can use the Resource Manager to upload the resource back to the deployed portal. WebCenter Portal's round-trip development features provide a simple, convenient way to modify portal resources without redeploying the entire application.

Iterative Development: Lets you make changes to your WebCenter Portal: Framework application at design time while it is running on the Integrated WebLogic Server and immediately see the effect of those changes simply by refreshing the browser. Iterative development allows developers to work more quickly and efficiently when building a portal application. For example, iterative development lets you see changes to the following components almost instantly upon a browser refresh:

• page definitions
  
  
• navigation model
  
  
• page hierarchy
  
  
• existing JSPX files
  
  
• page templates
  
  
• resource catalog
  
  
• addition of task flows to pages
  
  
• addition of portlets to pages