With the advent of BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1, a host of new technologies was introduced. These are, among others: Java Page Flow with annotations, Java Controls, and a new IDE to support it. Online tutorials were also thrown into the package to show how the new technologies were supposed to be put to work in the most effective way.

One of the nice features of the WebLogic Portal 8.1 release is a fairly extensive content management system. It does not, nor was it ever intended to, compete with the large content management vendors on the market today, but for many applications it works quite well. There are some problems however with using the content management system. This article will address several of them and provide details of a dev2dev tool that will help get around them.

Ricoh Company, Ltd., Tokyo, a leading provider of office equipment, has implemented BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 for its customer relationship management (CRM) portal site in Japan called NetRICOH.

Enterprise portals are fast becoming the foundation of the Web-based economy thanks to their ability to give enterprises, trading partners, and customers global access to enterprise applications, back-office systems, and IT infrastructures. This ability has made enterprise portals appealing as the infrastructure of choice for enterprise IT organizations and has helped organizations justify the considerable expense of migrating from legacy systems.

In part one (Vol.3, issue 7) of this two-part article, we discussed the 'on demand' information delivery architecture based on portal technologies and WSRP. In this part, the concept of on demand will be extended beyond the information delivery layer to the information aggregation and integration layer. We'll introduce the Enterprise Information Bus (EIB) and discuss its role in building service-on-demand portals.

Enterprises are moving towards a highly collaborative environment to achieve higher competitive advantage. Availability of the right information across the enterprise at the right time has become a key capability to provide such an advantage. Though this was a well-understood objective, various architectures that evolved to manifest such an enterprise information delivery infrastructure were not elegant, intuitive, or aligned to governance and organizational dynamics.

Current Web applications, especially portals, have become increasingly content driven. It led to development of a plethora of sophisticated and powerful Web Content Management Systems, or WCMS. They help to automate creation, management, reviewing, tagging, rendering, publication, maintenance, and deprecation of Web content. Usually, these systems support a wide variety of content types and formats; however, most of them stop short of supporting one crucial type - application data.

WebLogic Portal 8.1 Service Pack 2 has been out for several months. By the time this article is published, Service Pack 3 may also be out. Having worked on a couple of WebLogic Portal projects with this version, I have come across several small and large issues.

A portlet is a Web component that generates fragments - pieces of markup (e.g., HTML, XML) adhering to certain specifications. Fragments are aggregated to form a complete document. This article introduces the Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 on Java Portlets. It illustrates the creation of Java Portlets using BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 SP2 and the deployment of these portlets on BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 SP2.