B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

72 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
layer. Services offered by this layer include session management, logging,
security, personalization, document management, workflow management,
subscription and notification and search and indexing. It also provides
an API through which other enterprise applications, external applications
and legacy systems could be integrated into the portal environment.
The services layer components include an application server, an
SMTP server, a Web server, an LDAP server and an administration
server. All these components together provide a highly scalable, reliable
and robust architecture that can handle large enterprise systems and
heavy traffic on the portal. The services layer offers features such as
load balancing, distributed transaction control, message translation and
the ability to handle multiple component types (EJB, COM, COM+,
CORBA).
The application server, the heart of a portal framework, should
ensure maximum portability and flexibility by being built on a standards
based architecture that includes support for all the leading technologies
such as CORBA, RMI, EJB, XML, .Net and SOAP. Further, it should
enable an end-to-end integration from the Internet to the mainframe.
The Web server is an HTTP-based server for hosting static content
and dynamic Web applications. It acts as a container and distributor of
a collection of HTML/XML pages, JSPs, Servlets, Java classes, applets,
ASPs, images, multimedia files and other file types. It provides high
performance and availability through page caching, session state
management and application server integration.
The SMTP server is responsible for managing the e-mail flows
through the portals. The e-mail addresses of the portal users are exposed
to the enterprise e-mail server via the LDAP server. The portal framework
should implement a WebDAV server, which is an Internet standard for
accessing documents over the Web protocol HTTP using XML encoding
of data.
The administration tool gives a single point of monitoring and
management of the system.
The core services offered by the service layer are:
Personalization — Personalization features most commonly associated
with portals are the ability to offer views of content based on a user's
organizational role and for end users to customize their interfaces. The