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Portlets can be as simple as the meal plan at your company for nextweek or as complex as a complete shop system. This is really up to you.Using Sybase EP, you can develop such a portlet without programming.In addition, the product supports deployment to leading applicationservers and offers point-and-click portal maintenance with tools youmight already know. You will develop a portlet later in this chapter.Sybase Enterprise Portal (EP) Fields of ApplicationFeel free to use Sybase Enterprise Portal for every kind of (distributed)application you like. Because Sybase EAServer is included andmost of the Sybase products are intended for use with their transactionserver, you have a lot of options for how to use it. This list shows youwhat is available and might be of use to you or your company.• Portal Services — We demonstrate Sybase EP Portal Services, theheart of the portal, later in this chapter. If you want to dig deeper orhave a need for content management, content workflow, dynamicpublishing, advanced deployment options, categorization, personalization,and search and presentation services, you will be able tofind these kinds of features, but they might not be directly in thebox. For example, a content-management system is available as aseparate add-on from Sybase.• Mobile and wireless extensions — Sybase iAnywhere Solutions hasbeen very successful in the mobile business for several years. Itoffers a special version of EAServer, the iAnywhere Wireless Server,with a preinstalled framework that supports mobile devices. Thismobile and wireless framework and its extensions include mobileInternet browsing by automatic device detection and other usefulfeatures, secure and reliable messaging, and a lot of other usefulstuff. Ask for a test version of this wireless server. In addition, theacquisition of AvantGo in early 2003 will further expand the productline.• Enterprise-integration services — Sybase acquired New Era of Technology(NEN) in 2001, which pushed the company more in thedirection of a tools vendor offering everything needed in the enterprise,including integration services. Sybase now helps you take fulladvantage of different legacy applications, data-management systems,and different messaging middleware tools such as JMS orMQSeries. These integration services can exchange key informationbetween applications for event-based information integration. Newe-business applications can be integrated with legacy systems toincrease a company’s return on investment or to bring a centralpoint of view to your company. Note that this is available as a separateproduct suite. These products are not the cheapest, but it’sworthwhile to evaluate them and invest the money if you like them.This tool package includes a business process flow engine calledAdapters for packaged and legacy applications (ERP, CRM, CORBAapplications, CICS transactions, stored procedures, and custom applications)supporting synchronous (request/reply) and asynchronous(publish/subscribe) interactions and adapters for LAN and mainframedatabases that support synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Italso includes an internal message bus and adapters to TIBCO/Rendezvous,MQSeries, and JMS, a graphical development and deploymenttool for defining process flows and generating application servercomponents. These components would be used to expose integrateddata and business logic based on users’ role-based access rights. Thereis a graphical tool for managing, maintaining, and monitoring theenterprise-integration services.• B2B extensions — Sybase offers a solution for business-to-business(B2B) extensions. These include the technologies needed to enableand automate B2B collaboration across organizations, includingsuppliers and partners, to provide a single point of access to multiplee-marketplaces. Sybase calls this solution eMarketLink. It hasthree main components: Composer, Server, and Server Manager.Process flows are designed using the Composer, the Server runs theprocess flow jobs, and the Manager provides a graphical environmentto manage the entire environment. Again, these are productsthat Sybase got through the merger with NEN. They are also availableas separate products.EP’s FeaturesSybase EP is a very complex product. It’s not as easy to get started withas PowerBuilder (and if you want to become a good PowerBuilderdeveloper, this isn’t easy). You should explore a lot of features after youhave installed the complete product. Let’s have a look at what’s on yourmachine.Major FeaturesAn access-control database is provided where user access rights arestored and the user is evaluated against it when the user logs in. SybaseEP provides a page where you can register yourself for the portal. Youenter information such as first name, last name, username, password,and e-mail. After submitting this information you can log into the portalby entering your username and password. This information ismatched against the information found in the access-control database(ACDB). The database used is a Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere database.By registering, the user becomes part of the Default group. Theadministrator has assigned pages to this group that the newly registereduser is allowed to see and has access to immediately when helogs in. Portal administrators can assign additional groups or pages tothis user any time.Account access in the Portal Interface is controlled by EnterpriseSecurity. You will see how this works a bit later.The Portal Interface is an enterprise portal that end users view andinteract with to access predefined content or to create their own content.It consists of site areas and tools that help you create and manageyour pages.Portlets display the content you have selected from the Portal Interfaceor the Web. Portlets are visual, dynamic components that make upa Web page and reside in the enterprise portal. Typically, when an enduser requests a personalized page, multiple portlets are invoked whenthat page is created. Take care when you choose a portal that theportlets rely on APIs to access various types of information, such as auser profile.Until now, the lack of standards has led portal server platform vendorsto define proprietary APIs for local portal components and for theinvocation of remote components. This creates interoperability problemsfor portal customers, application vendors, content providers, andportal software vendors. To overcome these problems, the biggestenterprise portal vendors, including Sybase, defined the Java PortletAPI. It cleanly separates portlets from the surrounding portal serverinfrastructure so that the portlets can run on different portal servers,just as servlets can run on different application servers. The API is nowspecified (see JSR 168, “Portlet Specification,” onwww.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168) and greatly enhances enterpriseportals.Sybase Portal Studio is the application for portal development andadministration. Portal Studio enables developers to build a variety ofportlets, templates, pages, and catalogs without having to learn anyportlet application interfaces (APIs). Developers can create HTML, JSP,XML, database, and Web content portlets without programming byusing step-by-step wizards or the Portal Studio’s Portlet Builder. PortalStudio is a Web application, so you log in using Internet Explorer (orNetscape Communicator, in the Enterprise edition). Portal Studio alsoprovides a collaborative environment for developers and administratorsby offering workflow, versioning, a search filter, a detail view, androles-based access.All user access to Studio objects and Portal Interface pages andportlets in Portal Studio is controlled through the Portal StudioAccount Manager.Developers create content in Portal Studio and deploy it to displayfor end users in portlets in Portal Interface. Administrators useboth Portal Studio and Portal Interface to do portal administrativetasks. Either an administrator or end user controls the pages andwww.SYS-CON.COM/pbdj/PBDJ volume12 issue417