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1 The front end to SOA
Whilst the concept of a service oriented architecture (SOA) has gained widespread acceptance, much of the current discussion has focussed on the back-end technology; the design and build of web services and linking them together into a workflow, rather than on what it means to the end-user. However, SOA is a business-centric IT approach with just as much a focus on people as there is on the technology.
An SOA promotes the reuse of existing application components as sets of functional services, along with the development of new services and their assembly in flexible ways, but that is only part of the story. An SOA enables the creation of business processes that support and encourage the building of additional business value through teamwork and collaboration. Here, the focus is on maximising people productivity within an SOA, delivered through a natural, intuitive and adaptive user interface.
As business processes move from the old model based on monolithic and largely static applications to the new SOA approach of loosely coupled, integrated and flexible constructed and orchestrated composite applications based on flexible workflows, users will take on a new and empowered role. In the past, the application was in control and the role of the user was simply to feed it data as required. For many organisations, it was easier to change the business processes to fit with the way the application worked than to try and adapt the application to support existing or new business processes. In the future, the user will take back a significant level of control of the running of business processes and will be in greater control of the overall flow of business activities needed. Such capabilities point to a new level of importance for the interaction of the user with the available technology, and therefore of the criticality of the user interface in the SOA world.
Portal software can provide a doorway to the entire set of Web services and workflows in the SOA environment, as the base tool for deploying and managing portlets built from the underlying services. The portal software can create an environment that provides a consistent, standards-based entry point to a diverse and distributed set of application function, in which the Web services appear as portlets in the portal environment. Portal software can no longer just be viewed as the "window on the world" - showing information in the best way possible - but also as the means for the user to aggregate disparate data sources, to create new ways of dealing with dynamic business processes, and for the user to be able to maximise their capabilities to deal with business issues in an effective manner.
2 Portals and portlets
Contrary to popular belief and to the early generations of portal vendors, portals do not just consist of front-end "eye candy" that gives views of underlying datasets. A portal is a complete system that aggregates services and data from a number of different sources and typically provides personalised capabilities to its users. In addition, business portals are often designed to share information and create added value through advanced collaboration technologies such as workplaces and other shared functions.
Portlets are pluggable user interface components that are aggregated into a portal page. The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) protocol provides a web services standard to allow the "plug-and-play" of remote running portlets from disparate sources, and the Java Portlet Specification (JSR 168) enables interoperability for portlets between different web portals. These standards are increasingly important as we move in to the SOA world - new
"applications" coming through from independent software vendors (ISVs) often have little in the way of a full user client, depending on either access through a browser or providing their main value through direct integration into existing portals.
Many will be familiar with the above concepts through web sites that allow registered users to personalise their view of the site by turning on or off portions of the webpage, or by adding or deleting features (called "gadgets" on Microsoft?s live.com and Google personalised homepage). This functionality is usually accomplished by a set of 'portlets' that together form the overall portal.
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