The Web Server

The web server acts as the front end of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture. When a client connects to the server by way of a URL, the system displays a sign-in screen sent to the browser in HTML. The web server manages communication with the browser.

The following web server products can be configured to deploy your PeopleSoft applications: Oracle WebLogic server.

Two key PeopleSoft servlets run on the web server—the presentation relay servlet and portal servlet.

Presentation Relay Servlet

The presentation relay servlet is used to process all inbound and outbound HTTP requests for PeopleSoft transactions and queries. This very thin servlet acts as a relay between the client device and the core back-end services on the application server. It receives and serves HTML, XML, and wireless markup language (WML) requests over HTTP.

Portal Servlet

The portal servlet is a Java servlet that runs on the portal web server. It intercepts user requests for HTML pages, retrieves the requested page, wraps additional content around it, and then sends the resulting page to the user's browser. The servlet acts as an invisible browser that sits between the user's browser and requested content.

The portal servlet:

• Provides a consistent user interface.

  The portal servlet checks properties associated with each content reference, including the name of a portal template. When a user accesses content through the portal, the portal servlet wraps the target page with the portal template specified in the content reference. This template provides a consistent user interface.

• Ensures that PeopleSoft-specific tags are processed correctly.

  Developers create portal pages using a template-based layout system. In addition to traditional HTML tags, templates can contain PeopleSoft-specific tags that a normal browser cannot interpret. At runtime, the portal servlet can interpret these PeopleSoft-specific tags when constructing templates, as well as any other HTML content. The portal servlet then sends the resulting page to a browser as a single HTML document.

One of the most important aspects of portal technology is its role in integrating content from a wide variety of data sources and displaying that content on a single page in a coherent, understandable, and presentable way. We refer to this complex process as “page assembly and proxying.” Portal processing assembles the page to be displayed based on the content retrieved from various data sources. It uses portal templates to wrap the contents of the assembled document into a single page that fits into the context of the site.

• For page-based templates, the portal servlet assembles pages for the browser.

  It ensures that all URL references in the HTML on the assembled page are references back to the portal servlet itself. In some cases, each URL in the HTML document assembled by the portal servlet must be rewritten to reference the portal servlet, not the originally requested URL. This process of redirecting URLs so that they point to the portal servlet is called proxying.

• For frame-based templates, the portal server updates the src tags in the frameset with the target content and sends it to the browser.

  When working with a frame-based template, the portal servlet inserts a URL into each frame in the src tag and sends it to the browser rather than retrieving documents for the browser as it does with page-based templates.