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IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud
IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud: Build a comprehensive web portal for your company with a complete coverage of all the project lifecycle stages with this book and ebook.

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IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud

Chapter 1. Portal Assessment

This chapter covers the initial portal assessment leading to a Proof of Value (POV), which needs to be executed for portal engagements at program and/or project levels. One of the main assessment goals is to capture the business drivers for choosing this technology and evaluate the business value to be added with a portal solution. The outcome of the business assessment is a current and future state gap analysis and subsequently a mapping of the business drivers to portal capabilities. The assessment covers business and technology aspects. It helps drive the next discussion of the need for portal governance, process, and organizational changes that a portal project can bring as a requirement to an enterprise moving to the portal paradigm. This chapter will provide orientation to get started with assessing and looking at options for a portal POV; and how the cloud plays an important role in the enablement. By the time we are done, we will have looked at the following topics:

  • IBM WebSphere Portal (WP), IBM Web Experience Factory (WEF), and the cloud

  • Cloud service models — SaaS/IaaS/PaaS

  • A case study

  • Cloud use cases applied

Note

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IBM WebSphere Portal (WP), IBM Web Experience Factory (WEF), and the cloud


Portals are single point of access for information, knowledge, business services, and transactions; providing aggregation and role-based access to Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Employee (B2E); along with vertical and horizontal domain support. Portals also allow for that data to be served on a variety of devices, anytime, anywhere. From an architectural viewpoint, a portal is an architectural pattern implemented and realized via a product with out-of-the-box integration potentials and capabilities. From a technology standpoint, the IBM WebSphere Portal is a J2EE application with its engine being compliant with portal-specific APIs, such as JSR 168, JSR 286, and WSRP. So what is the cloud and how can it help you with your WP and WEF related initiatives? Let's first start with some basic definitions.

Cloud is a delivery model that uses virtualization to build, provision, deploy, and enable environments, resources, and services. More precisely, its canonical definition according to the working definition of cloud computing published by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is as follows:

Cloud computing can be described as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned, and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

To complement it, IBM defines cloud computing as follows:

Cloud computing changes the way we think about technology. Cloud is a computing model providing web-based software, middleware, and computing resources on demand. By deploying technology as a service, you give users access only to the resources they need for a particular task. This prevents you from paying for idle computing resources. Cloud computing can also go beyond cost savings by allowing your users to access the latest software and infrastructure offerings to foster business innovation.

SaaS/IaaS/PaaS cloud engagement models


For almost every new technology and trend in business and technology initiatives, there are standards developed around it. Along with the Open Cloud Manifesto, there are some use cases for cloud computing defined in a white paper entitled Cloud Computing Use Cases 2.0 pioneered by the Cloud Computing Use Case group. Let's now take a look at cloud NIST definitions as for the three major cloud service models. Because, whenever the cloud topic is involved, it is in the context of these services models, which are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Let's break them down and look at their defining characteristics:

  • SaaS: SaaS is related to an application that is served and consumed over the wire, where the consumer itself has no control over the runnable software in terms of the operating system, network infrastructure, and hardware; so it is more like a black box for the consumer. The consumer only uses the service provided but does not control nor have knowledge of the behind-the-scenes mechanics.

  • PaaS: PaaS is related to the consumer having a little bit of control over the hosting environment for the application it consumes and runs. So the platform can be an application framework; but still the consumer does not have any control over the hardware, network, storage, and operating system for that hosting environment.

  • IaaS: IaaS is related to the consumer having control over the deployed resources as a whole in terms of storage, operating system, hardware in general, and in some cases even networking.

How WP and WEF in the cloud can help your initiative, and the value added will vary depending on what phase of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) you are addressing. Regardless, if you are planning a new infrastructure or portal migration, or a POV, the level of value the cloud brings can vary. However, the return on investment (ROI) can be achieved in all phases of the SDLC.

How are WP and WEF represented in the IBM business SmartCloud and Amazon Cloud? For those interested in the new cloud delivery model of provisioning portal development, integration, system test (user acceptance and performance), and production environments, the IBM SmartCloud has a plausible and viable solution. Based on the starting guide, we will walk you through the whole process. For the purposes and scope of this chapter, we will focus on the development environment only.

Getting started—case study


In this book, we will base all of our case study examples on a fictitious bank client named A2Z Bullion Bank that has, as a business driver, the need for modernization of its call center operations. Another major driver is the need to revamp and rebrand some of the banking operations via the consolidation and integration of a lot of application functionality, previously available in Customer Information Control System (CICS). Even though this client belongs to the financial sector, all the examples in this book can be easily correlated and translated to several other industry domains.

At a high level, the A2Z Bullion Bank, which has been providing other commercial banks with Bullion Vault services, uses 3270 terminals for its offshore call center operations. It uses CICS and a relational backend for its many frontend applications, all of which need to be consolidated via Portal. So far, the bank had only interfaced with other bullion or central banks, but it is now opening its operations to other corporate broker consumers interested in Bullion Vault services. The Vault services allow users to store physical bullion metal bars (gold, platinum, palladium, and silver) in the Vaults. Transfers from fiat currencies and loans are also services aligned with Vault services. Furthermore, users can forecast and trend their future Vault performance based on future metal spot prices. The bank stakeholders have decided on the need to have a self-service consumer-oriented channel for this new activity.

The goal of the bank is to understand how portal and the cloud would be able to help in the modernization process to be able to gauge the value added and ROI.

Let's start with our case study and the Business Value Assessment (BVA). IBM BVA is an IBM-driven methodology and should be applied with the help of IBM consultants and business partners. The generic steps of a portal BVA are cited and illustrated as follows:

  1. 1. One of the main goals of the assessment is to capture the business drivers for choosing this technology and evaluate the business value to be added with portal. The outcome of the business assessment is a current and future state gap analysis and subsequently a mapping of the business drivers and requirements to portal capabilities. The assessment covers business and technological aspects, and helps drive the next discussion of the need for portal governance, process, and organizational changes that a portal project can bring as a requirement to an organization new to portal. First, we cover in a workshop-like format with active interviewing of stakeholders per module target background, objectives, and defined approach. The output of these first items serves as an input to feed the next exercise. The business need and portal solution align together via the particular business and technical drivers and the current state of the business assessed. This initial portal assessment needs to be done for every portal engagement at a project and ideally at the program level. Next, we will cover the main steps in the BVA cycle — background, objective, and approach.

  2. 2. Business need and portal alignment.

  3. 3. A "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration.

  4. 4. Financial case.

  5. 5. Recommendations and next steps — POV.

Step 1 — background, objective, and approach

IBM consultants and partners have many ways to explore a BVA methodology. This direction was chosen because the BVA methodology can help to do the following:

  • It aligns Line of Business (LOB) and IT management with a common and prioritized set of capabilities for your portal.

  • It provides you with a vision of the portal when it's complete.

  • It gives you a high-level cost and benefit analysis to define the value of a portal solution in financial terms. The corporate positioning helps to set the stage for defining the vision, the strategy, and the execution.

Step 2 — business need and portal alignment:

In order to get to the road map and future state, the IBM consultant and portal architect had to go over a few workshops to gather the required data.

Business value alignment

It starts with the million dollar question — "What should our organization do with a portal and workplace to solve their current pain points and address the need for the future and new business demands?" We will not go into any details of this approach in this book, but we will give you the pain points to make our lifecycle story complete and give you a frame of reference for your own portal initiatives. The following diagram will provide the high-level phases to get the portal off the ground. Any portal engagement would have to apply a similar level of analysis in order to realize the portal value.

Business drivers and current state

The A2Z Bank has funded a program with PMO support to facilitate the need for governance around the portal initiative. They are in the process of being educated on the value of having such infrastructure support around the new initiatives. They want to have a POV done quickly to show how the portal value can be added within a short time to market. The major business drivers were the need for modernization and the new line of business and self-service customer channel to support. A series of workshops was done with several lines of business stake holders to cover the preceding aspects.

Current state, future state, and a road map

One of the main focuses of capturing current state is to capture the current organization processes in place at the enterprise level and understand how they can be positioned to a future state and enterprise road map that has portal capabilities in its critical path. From there, a future state can be mapped out and a demonstration can be done at a more generic level with the "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration for vertical markets. Then a POV using stubbed data from real data and service models can be used to further illustrate and demonstrate quick business-driven development with the IBM SmartCloud, WP, and WEF patterns.

Current state — pain points and how portal capabilities can fill the gap

Once the workshop and interviews that focus on documenting current internal processes, governance maturity level, and so on are all done, there is a mapping to portal and cloud capabilities, along with the demand for fast application development and value to market. The outcome of this exercise will allow the value of portal to be illustrated and imagined. The next step is to map out the demonstration of financial case to the "prospects" executive sponsors.

The following list consists of a high-level road map potential with a few critical points identified and their recommended solution provided:

  • According to the BVA, 70 percent of the A2Z IT budget goes into maintenance of current applications

  • According to the BVA, 39 percent of A2Z bugs in the system are due to misconfiguration

  • According to the BVA, 85 percent of its IT capacity sits idle

  • According to the BVA, 49 percent of the A2Z enterprise applications are not integrated but working in large IT silos and without any governance oversight

Step 3 — A "Day-in-the-Life" demonstration

In order to make the business case and demonstrate, some of the added value with portal and the cloud, a series of presentations were made available to top decision makers and stakeholders. These dynamic demonstrations are not just static PowerPoint presentations. They are full-fledged, interactive demonstrations presented via a web browser. It allows for stakeholders to relate to and anticipate that their business goals would be positively changed by portal capabilities. These are necessary steps in bringing the road map vision closer to the business case. Take your time to watch them and look at a sample that matches the industry domain for which you work. After these presentations were shown, that was a general consensus that the portal initiative would have A2Z Bullion Bank on the right road to the future. The next step was to create a financial case to show the financial gains of adopting both portal and the cloud as the new paradigms for A2Z Bullion Bank Infrastructure Technology.

Here are some links where you can read articles and watch videos, and learn more about the following topics:

Step 4 — the financial case

IBM consultants, software sales experts, and business partners can help build a financial case for an enterprise. In this case, A2Z Bullion Bank utilized the services of an IBM business partner for most of its modernization efforts. The financial case was built and shown to the CFO and his teams, along with other important executive players, such as the CTO and his teams. The financial case is an important module in the BVA exercise, as it plays the role of the major decision-maker item in a value proposition. Besides the huge financial gains, this cloud-enabled portal initiative (with fast time to market value proposition as one of the main criterion) and major pain points with which the current IT infrastructure deals and struggles with, were going to be addressed.

Stakeholders also watched online banking, multichannel banking, and payment presentations, and were highly impressed with all the capabilities that portal could bring to the table as a way to allow A2Z Bank to move into the future.

Step 5 — recommendations and next steps — POV

The next steps were laid out and agreed upon.

A POV was approved by the stakeholders, and a full project schedule and resource support allocated and dedicated to make it come to fruition.

In our sample, we will perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Use a cloud provider to quickly provision the development environment dedicated to the POV.

  2. 2. Use the WP and WEF cloud patterns to expedite the development and integration phases along with IBM Industry Toolbox.

  3. 3. Use the feedback from the BVA to drive the use cases for the POV with the assistance of a portal architect and WEF specialist.

  4. 4. Have the scope and use cases for the POV, and implementation plan reviewed and approved before moving to implementation. In this case, the POV was going to be focused on the banking channel only using data mostly from the banking template, but add some customization, and serve as a functional development sandbox for portal-related development efforts.

With a POV funded and ordered to be delivered within a timeframe, the decision was made to use the IBM development and test cloud. After that, a private cloud would be used to jump-start the physical infrastructure for the entire portal initiative lifecycle.

A program-level road map was designed and agreed upon in the following circumstances:

  1. 1. Where first phase would transfer and/or integrate some of the foundational functionality into portal information architecture for both the banking channel and the call center. It would use the new IBM X150 DataPower appliance to mediate the data entry points and functional layers via SOA reference architecture; along with the Master Data Management reference architecture.

  2. 2. Second phase would deal with portal areas such as Business Process Management (BPM), content management, Single Sign-On (SSO), and custom search. The entire program would have strong governance, Application Performance Management (APM), and business intelligence (via analytics) support. This initiative would take advantage of the cloud capabilities for its plan of business success via IT execution. Cloud patterns would be reused to expedite the environment build-out and time to market via IBM Workload Deployer (second phase BPM, SSO, search topics will be fully covered in the next edition).

Cloud use cases applied


The BVA covered a lot of ground and provided a road map for the future.

The generic outcome of the BVA concerning cloud-related aspects was that:

  • IaaS would be adopted for this transformation effort (as a consumer) saving costs

  • PaaS would be adopted for this transformation effort (as a consumer) saving costs

  • SaaS would be a service model on which the bank would start capitalizing via its call center and self-service channels (as a cloud provider); thus generating profits

A decision was made to start the prototype effort using a cloud provider. Both the Amazon and IBM SmartCloud are great options, which provide both development and test micro images that can be easily and quickly deployed. They both offer the elasticity and standardization on top of virtualization and the value of central monitoring, and quick environment build-out is added along with the other advantages. In this chapter, we will share how to get started with both cloud providers. In the real world, one would choose one cloud provider, but for informational purposes, we will show both of them for the prototype and POV goals. Let's first start with IBM SmartCloud. This next section will demonstrate how to log in, choose, create, manage, and deploy both the portal run-time environments and the WEF development environment in IBM SmartCloud, Amazon Cloud, or on a standalone virtual image machine.

Cloud approach with IBM enterprise SmartCloud — initial high-level tasks

The following diagram illustrates the basic steps in getting your IBM Cloud up and running, and then using the banking template:

To get your IBM Cloud up and running, perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Contact your IBM representative to set up an account, and order the SmartCloud plan and the capacity options for reserved, capped, or uncapped resources.

  2. 2. Register and create a login ID, and access the cloud.

  3. 3. We then choose a pattern topology based on the needs and scope of this environment. In this case, it will have WP, WEF, IHS. Initialize a new instance and add necessary topology artifacts (start and stop portal server—start and stop HTTP server). Start WEF and get your Hello portlet up and running. For further information on this step, please read the IBM Smart Business Cloud getting started guide - WebSphere Portal V6.1.5 article located at http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Smart_Business_Cloud_A_getting_started_guide.

  4. 4. Prepare and deploy the banking template and create necessary portal pages to host the portlets based on the wire frames identified and proposed during the BVA and implemented via services contract for the POV initiative.

  5. 5. Customize the template with the bank data model (captured, documented, and stub developed during the BVA) and the desired corporate branding. Prepare some stub data for the POV itself.

Cloud approach with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — initial high-level tasks

The following diagram illustrates the basic steps in getting your Amazon EC2 Cloud up and running, and then using the banking template:

To get your Amazon EC2 Cloud up and running, perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Sign up for Amazon Service.

  2. 2. We register and create a login ID and log on to the console.

  3. 3. We then choose an AMI pattern topology based on the needs and scope of this environment. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/amis/2048 for the standard development Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for portal.

  4. 4. Initialize a new instance and add necessary topology artifacts and launch it (start and stop portal server, ­ start and stop HTTP server). Start WEF locally and get your Hello portlet up and running. For more information on how to boot and manage your portal image, please read IBM Websphere Portal and Lotus WebSphere Content Management Amazon Machine Image Get Started Guide located at http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/cloud/wps-wcme/Get_Started_Lotus_AMI.pdf.

  5. 5. Create a test project on WEF and download the WebSphere Portal Solution Installer. Consult the IBM WebSphere Portal Solution Installer - User Guide for any questions related to the Portal Solution Installer. Move the.war files to portal and deploy portlets and pages to the cloud (or to a standalone virtual machine from VMware). Smoke test the banking portlets' functionality.

    Note

    For a great advanced demonstration on how to manage Amazon images, please watch the multimedia presentation by Andrew Glover in the IBM developerWorks article — Cloud computing with Amazon EC2. It can be found at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/lp/demos/summary/j-cloudamazonec2.html.

  6. 6. Prepare and deploy the banking template and create necessary portal pages to host the portlets based on the wire frames identified and proposed during the BVA.

  7. 7. Customize the template with the bank data model (captured, documented, and stub developed during the BVA) and the desired corporate branding.

The next steps are common to either cloud provider. They are as follows:

  1. 1. Prepare the environment for the portlets using IBM Toolbox banking portlet. Follow this article and read the instructions on how to do so. In this case study, we use the IBM Toolbox banking portlets to jump-start the development for the financial domain. We look at the real banking data model and document it with the labor resources allocated to the POV.

  2. 2. Prepare the environment (either cloud or a private standalone virtual machine mentioned in cloud vendor choice steps).

  3. 3. Configure the banking portlet database along with authentication, and run a verification test to make sure the containers are up and running with the expected container and application-level connectivity. Create a test project on WEF, and download the WebSphere Portal Solution Installer. Consult the IBM WebSphere Portal Solution Installer User Guide for any questions related to the Portal Solution Installer. Move the .war files to portal and deploy portlets and pages to the cloud (or to a standalone machine). Smoke test the banking portlets' functionality.

  4. 4. Prepare and deploy necessary custom test stub data. Create a custom data or stub a service layer and implement it for the POV. In case of A2Z Bank, a service layer was created to map to the data layer as part of the POV requirement to have a fully functional portal. In this case, the SQL provided to build the data model for the banking template was architecturally converted into web services definitions with the proper operations to the data layer, as part of the POV project scope. The following link provides the documented data model, which was converted into XML and then created as service interfaces:

    http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/dx/Introduction_to_the_IBM_Banking_template_for_WebSphere_Portal_bnk_2.0.0

    These steps require the collaboration of a portal, service, and data architect.

Once your Portal sandbox environment is operational, (regardless of the cloud vendor or if you create a standalone virtual machine) and you have some stub data to play with, perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Configure and customize look and feel, and align it with corporate branding strategy.

  2. 2. Officially demonstrate and prove the value of WEF and WP aligned with a cloud.

After the POV was done and its success was acknowledged, the next steps were laid out for the full-blown portal initiative to be kicked off. It was decided that while the banking template would speed up time to market on the self-service channel, the Web Experience Factory would allow for fast development of custom code for the center effort. Both of them would benefit from the advantages of using a cloud service and delivery model.

Portal and Cloudonomics sense


We hope we have given the reader the tools to look into the various possible adoptions of cloud computing in relation to portal initiatives. There are ways to look into the pain versus gain and cost benefit of such claim that "cloud computing can be viewed as a means of reducing cost, increasing revenue, improving business agility, and enhancing the total customer experience". Joe Weinman from www.cloudonomics.com coined the term "Cloudonomics" and laid out 10 laws and formulae to contextualize the value created by cloud computing. They could be used to look at your own portal and gauge the benefits of cloud computing.

To simplify, let's look at first five ones that made the business case for A2Z portal in the cloud, and how the ROI is measured against these items as follows:

  • Law no. 1 Utility services cost less even though they cost more: The "Value of Utility in the Cloud" (simulation) enables assessment of different provisioning intervals and their resulting costs in light of the demand function." That means a good cloud estimation model can show hybrid, shared, dedicated cloud patterns, and the overall cost benefit of outsourcing your cloud to a provider versus creating and managing your own enterprise cloud. Besides, this can take into account how the pay-per-use model (as opposed to just on demand) can help us build a financial case.

  • Law No. 2 On-demand trumps forecasting: "The ability to provision capacity rapidly means that any unexpected demand can be serviced, and the revenue associated with it captured. The ability to rapidly deprovision capacity means that companies don't need to pay good money for nonproductive assets". So, if the portal utilization growth rate is linear versus exponential, the value of the cloud utility exercise can help us define the capacity provisioning approach based on the estimated or known growth patterns.

  • Law No. 3 The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks: Under this strategy, the total capacity deployed is the sum of these individual peaks. However, as clouds can reallocate resources across many enterprises with different peak periods, a cloud needs to deploy less capacity. So, let's say that in the banking domain (unlike tax businesses are concerned about April 15th, a retailer with Black Friday, a broadcaster with Super Bowl) due to the dynamic nature of its business, A2Z Bank used the cloud to manage the sum of the peaks and the peak of the sum, as metal and bullion markets vary on a daily basis on the different world markets.

  • Law No. 4 Aggregate demand is smoother than individual: These two laws (3 and 4) are related in that value of aggregation and the value of resource pooling for peaks. They point out that economies of scale can apply cloud to its problems.

  • Law No. 5Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output: So in other words, A2Z Bank took into consideration demand patterns for both new bullion banking business and call center operations when deciding on the benefits of cloud computing for its enterprise portal solution.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be highly beneficial to portal applications for server, networking, data center, storage functionality, and the scalability. These are foundational and business critical infrastructures, which require the most flexibility to stay operational within the expected service-level agreements. There are, however, other business drivers as follows:

  • Reduced capital expenditures and labor costs for portal and overall IT.

  • Fast provisioning and deprovisioning of services to be exposed or consumed by portal.

  • Elastic resource pooling as computing resources are pooled to serve multiple capabilities. It fosters dynamic allocation and entitlement of virtual and physical resources based on service-level agreements, as well as on changing demand.

  • Superior service management with visibility, control, and automation across IT and business services. One of the main portal challenges is around having this visibility around portal services.

  • A plethora of possible portal deployment choices over the cloud, behind the firewall or as an integrated service delivery platform make it even more appealing.

The fact of the matter is that portal is an entry point to content, data, information services; and its performance and availability directly depends on the availability of all the services associated to it. Furthermore, cloud computing as a technology paradigm is only viable because that technology offers many benefits to business organizations deploying business solutions as follows:

  • Optimized development systems resources to keep portal developers productive. Portal development environments can become complex and expensive to create and maintain.

  • Reduced capital and licensing expenses portal efforts. They can be as much as 50 to 75 percent due to the on-demand provisioning of virtualized test resources via a test cloud.

  • Decreased portal operating and labor costs as much as 30 to 50 percent by automated provisioning and configuration of portal test environments. Portal application deployments and environment build-outs and configuration can be unique and prone to errors if not automated.

  • Improved quality by reducing defects that result from faulty portal configurations as much as 15 to 30 percent.

Summary


In this chapter, we covered the main phases of an initial portal evaluation. We looked at how a BVA can be done to uncover the value added by portal and how a road map for the entire enterprise can be one of the outputs of the BVA exercise. We looked at how a prototype can be started leveraging cloud using development images from either Amazon EC2 or IBM SmartCloud. We saw how patterns are built to expedite the prototype environment and kick off the portal effort. In this case, this fully functional environment would be leveraged for future development purposes. We also looked at high level, how Portal accelerators and toolbox assets can expedite the realization of value for an enterprise moving to the Portal paradigm. Remember that team work is always the best solution. These efforts are implemented with the collaboration of all stakeholders involved in a technology transformation effort and the support of IBM software, services, and other subject matter experts.

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Key benefits

  • The only book that explains the various phases in a complete portal project life cycle
  • Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips with clear step-by-step instructions and real time examples
  • Take a deep dive into Portal architectural analysis, design and deployment
  • Understand how profiling can be used to provide variability for customization, personalization and configuration of portlets and environments
  • Master the main approaches for classifying, isolating and resolving portal problems via troubleshooting
  • Instructions valid for Portal versions 7 and 8.

Description

IBM WebSphere® Portal is a cost- effective, scalable, and proven solution for the portal enterprise space. Given the depth and the breadth of WebSphere Portal and the challenges of developing a portal project, you need a book that covers all the nuances of the entire portal project lifecycle. This book accomplishes just that. In this book, we cover topics that range from portal assessment, governance, and architecture, to design and development. These topics are covered not only within these traditional areas, but also within the cloud environment context. Keeping both contexts in mind, several chapters are dedicated to portal and portlet testing, troubleshooting, performance monitoring, best practices, and tuning. The cloud option is also analyzed and discussed for hosting, developing, and publishing portal applications. We also cover Web Experience Factory (WEF) as the tool of choice for portlet development. We take you from the introduction to the development of advanced portlets in an intuitive and efficient manner. We cover not only common topics, such as builders, models, and user interface development, but also advanced topics, such as Dojo builders, Ajax techniques, and WEF performance. Within the WEF space, we cover other topics, which have never been covered before by any other competing book. You will learn how to develop multichannel applications, including web mobile applications and you will learn about the model types available for portlet development, including when and how to utilize them. We also present and discuss numerous aspects and facets of implementing a WEF project and what it takes to successfully deliver them. The richness and the profundity of the topics combined with an intuitive and well-structured presentation of the chapters will provide you with all the information you need to master your skills with the IBM WebSphere Portal project lifecycle and Web Experience Factory.

Who is this book for?

This book is written for any professional involved with a portal project. Professionals performing roles ranging from project and product management, program director, and architects to any lead role, will benefit from the project related segment of this book. The segment related to Portlet Development will benefit mostly portal developers and architects. Only this section requires some basic knowledge of IBM WebSphere Portal.

What you will learn

  • Master best practices in building portal environments for high availability
  • Explore Cloud topics as another paradigm for hosting, developing and publishing portal applications
  • Develop Portlets and multichannel applications utilizing WEF
  • Understand the performance benefits of using Dojo and Ajax in WebSphere Portal 7.0 and 8.0
  • Master how profiling can be used to provide variability for customization, personalization and configuration of portlets and environments
  • Understand the different model types available to WEF developers and learn how to choose the right ones for your portlets
  • Learn how to create web applications to run on iPhone and other mobile devices
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ISBN-13 : 9781849684040

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AU$349.99 billed in 18 months
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just AU$5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts

Frequently bought together


Stars icon
Total AU$ 265.97
IBM WebSphere Application Server v7.0 Security
AU$83.99
IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.0 Administration Guide
AU$90.99
IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud
AU$90.99
Total AU$ 265.97 Stars icon

Table of Contents

20 Chapters
Portal Assessment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Governance: Adopting the Mantra of Business Performance through IT Execution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Requirements Engineering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Architecture: Analysis and Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Golden and Cloud Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Build, Deployment, and Release Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Introduction to Web Experience Factory Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Service Layers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Invoking Web Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building the Application User Interface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Dojo Builders and Ajax Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
WEF Profiling Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Types of Models Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
WEF and Mobile Web Applications Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
How to Implement a Successful Portal Project with WEF Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portlet and Portal Testing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal and Portlet Performance Monitoring Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Troubleshooting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal, WEF, and Portlet Tuning Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Portal Post-production Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.6
(5 Ratings)
5 star 60%
4 star 40%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Dan Oct 29, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I was looking for a book around newer version of portal. I must say I was very surprised with the approach the book takes on the whole project life cycle which made me thing more about other items I normally would leave to other people to worry about. It is not like any other usual book covering portal and going straight into API. Moving now to be a lead in my team this was precisely what I was looking for to broaden my views. I liked it because the way it provides samples, illustrations and lots of links to other resources. It came in at a good time when I was assigned to a major project and wanted to make sure I stayed on top. Very useful in simple writing. The cloud samples were enough to get me started thinking in those terms ...
Amazon Verified review Amazon
CR Dec 11, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I was looking for a book on IBM WebSphere Portal 8 sometime back. I came across this book. This book describes the Hands on experience on IBM WebSphere Portal 8. With the release of WebSphere Portal 8, IBM recently added a newer member in WebSphere Portal Family.As I am PRO in WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Management, I found this book very helpful. This book have configurations and code which would help anyone who is looking forward to implement or migrate portal application in the industry. I would surely recommend this book to all who wants to checkout WebSphere Portal 8 and WEF cloud.Thanks & Regards,Chirag RanaIBM WebSphere Portal and WCM SpecialistPortal Lovers visit my blog:[...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Yixing Nov 04, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
One year ago, I learned that the authors were preparing this book. A few weeks ago, I was excited to find out that this book was published. In the past ten years, I have read many articles and books on IBM WebSphere Portal. Thus I was very interested in reading this book to see what distinguishes it from other books on this topic. After reading through this book, I have found the following features that make this book particularly outstanding among those books on IBM WebSphere Portal.First of all, the contents of this book are quite comprehensive. Following the life cycle of a portal project, this book starts from the initial portal assessment, and then it goes through each phase of that portal project life cycle until the portal application monitoring and performance tuning. In each phase, the main activities for developing a portal application are presented and described. This book also uses a sample project to illustrate these activities and present those contents precisely and concretely. At the same time, this book introduces the cloud in the context of portal and a mobile portal application to make the contents up-to-date.Next, the authors present these contents from a practitioner's point of view. This book is not intended to introduce the portal theory and the IBM WebSphere Portal product only. It takes the readers as portal project practitioners and leads them to know what they should do and how they should do to complete those activities at each phase of a portal project in order to complete a portal project successfylly. These what's and how's are a summary of authors' rich experiences that are accumulated from leading many portal projects to great successes, and the lessons they have learned from some difficult portal projects in the past many years. These experiences are of great value to portal practitioners.Thirdly, this book presented in a holistic way the IBM Web Experience Factory tool while introducing IBM WebSphere Portal. There are several different tools one can use to develop portlets such as the Rational Application Developer. Since many clients are also interested in developing portlets using the IBM Web Experience Factory tool, this book has several chapters that describe the details on how to develop an end-to-end portal application using this tool.Although IBM WebSphere Portal is not new to many portal practitioners, it remains a challenging task to develop a portal application for clients, and most companies are not able to afford such difficulties during portal projects. Therefore, no matter what role you play in a portal project, either as a portal architect, portal developer or a portal project manager, I recommend you to have a copy of this book at your hand when you are starting a portal project. At each phase and for each activity, see what this book advises and follow the instructions in this book to lead your portal project to a great success.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Sunil Patil Dec 10, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
It seems that IBM is investing a lot in IBM Web Experience factory in last few years. I wanted to learn about WEF but the problem is i was not able to find any suitable documentation or something that will let me learn about WEF in step by step manner. Then before few days Packt publishing contacted me to review the IBM Websphere Portal 8: Web Experience Factory and the Cloud book. This book has lot of information about the architecture, analysis and design, release management in the first part. The part that i was most interested in was from chapter 7 to chapter 15 which covers the websphere experience factory development. I went through these chapters and really enjoyed reading them. I want to thank Packtpub for coming up with a book that helped me learn about WebSphere experience factory
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Prakash Dec 26, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I liked the book very much. I have around 3 yrs exp in WEF. This book helped me to learn how to integrate portals to cloud.Much details available. The examples are preety good. & i did not have any problem while trying out the example of the book.Best part is examples are realfile based not " Hello world" type. :)Thank you a lot for getting me a chance to review such a nice well described book.This will surely help experienced persons like me as well as new developers trying to get there hand dirty in WEF.- Prakash
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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What is the delivery time and cost of print books? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

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Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela