1 Introduction to Developing for Oracle WebCenter Portal
Topics:
What Is the Purpose of This Guide?
This guide discusses developing WebCenter Portal assets, shared libraries and extensions to WebCenter Portal using Oracle JDeveloper.
Many of the tasks described in this guide involve activities that require Java, CSS, Application Development Framework (ADF), Expression Language (EL), and related experience.
Major activities described in this guide include:
Setting Up Your Environment
See the chapters on setting up your environment and your team environment in Setting Up a Development Environment.
Working with Assets
The chapters in Working with WebCenter Portal Assets explain how to develop WebCenter Portal assets such as layouts, page styles, page templates, skins, Content Presenter templates, and visualization templates. Several other parts of this guide also contain chapters devoted to working with other types of assets such as portlets, task flows, and shared libraries.
Working with Portlets
Portlets provide a means of presenting data from multiple sources in a meaningful and related way. Portlets can display excerpts of other web sites, generate summaries of key information, perform searches, and access assembled collections of information from a variety of data sources. Because several different portlets can be placed on a single page, users benefit from a single-source experience even though, in reality, the content may be derived from multiple sources. See the chapters of Working with Portlets for detailed information.
Working with Additional WebCenter Portal Customizations
You can provide additional functionality within WebCenter Portal by extending ADF assets, such as task flows, data controls, and managed beans, as a shared library, or provide page layout more suitable to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. For more information on these and other ways in which to customize WebCenter Portal, see the chapters in Additional WebCenter Portal Customizations.
What Is My Role as a WebCenter Portal Developer?
In some cases, WebCenter Portal may require custom components that do not exist out-of-the-box or cannot easily be created with WebCenter Portal’s runtime. For example, design requirements might call for page templates, page styles, and skins that are branded and organized in a precise way. In this case, you may need to use ADF Faces and CSS to achieve the desired look and feel, and JDeveloper is well-suited to such development. Other use cases may include developing custom components that allow for interaction between portal elements and data (for example, using ADF task flows or portlets with event handling). For example, as a WebCenter Portal developer, you may be asked to create and configure:
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Portal infrastructure components like page templates and page styles
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Custom portal extensions like task flows, data controls, and backing beans
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WebCenter Portlet Producer applications