EBS goes social - The triumvirate Liferay, Application Express and EBS Keywords: EBS, Portals, Application Express, Integration Overview Michael Pergande PROMATIS software GmbH Ettlingen As part of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) implementation projects additional development is frequently carried out based on Oracle Application Express (APEX). A logical next step is then to embed APEX in a portal context, in order to provide integration with other relevant business applications. Moreover, this ensures a consistent look, and facilitates the use of social media components that are provided in portal environments, such as discussion forums, blogs and wikis. In case this requirement is relevant, the first question to be answered is which portal software is used in order to implement the solution. As a consequence, the decision for a product imposes further technical questions. Next to using products from the Oracle portfolio (WebCenter Suite, complete development of the portal in APEX) there is also the possibility of using third-party software. One possible approach is to use the product Liferay Portal. After a presentation of the components and their technological basis it is shown by means of an example how such an integration might look like. Based on this the infrastructure resulting from this approach is presented followed by a discussion of further technical issues that arise and how approaches for solutions can look like. An evaluation of the approach based on the experiences round out the presentation. Motivation and Scenarios In the course of EBS implementation projects it became common practice to do additional development using APEX. Due to the web technology APEX offers it becomes a natural next step to integrate these additional components in a portal context in order to offer additional collaboration functionality and to make these components more accessible in the enterprise. Although there is Oracle technology available it might turn out that it cannot be used either because of financial reasons or due to infrastructural constraints. One possible solution in this case is the use of the Liferay Portal product, which is elaborated in further detail in this text. There are different scenarios concerning the degree of interaction between the portal component and the APEX components. There are situations in which a very loose coupling is sufficient, in this case the integration task is limited to authentication and a common layout.a more complex situation shows up when there is the need to exchange information (like session ids or search strings passed over from Liferay) between the portal component and APEX. The following text deals with all these questions and outlines possible solutions. Figure 1 shows a possible result of such a solution approach as it becomes visible for an end user.
Figure 1 Liferay Portal with integrated APEX based shop relying on EBS article data Involved Components In the following the relevant components are described in more detail. There is a focus on Liferay as the components EBS and APEX are well-known in the Oracle community. Further information concerning their integration is already available. Liferay Portal Liferay Portal is a modern state of the art portal software, developed in Java. It is available in two editions: as a free unsupported open-source community edition as well as an extended and supported enterprise edition. Liferay Portal supports Portlets according to JSR-168 (Portlet 1.0), to JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0) or to WSRP 2.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets). Liferay Portal consists of three main parts: Portal: it offers secure and role-based authentication with Single Sign-on (LDAP, Open-ID, NTML...), personalization with easy to use drag and drop, WebDAV, tagging support, Multilanguage support and themes. Content Management System based on the portal: Document Management, Image-Gallery, search functionality, Office support based on Sharepoint-Protocol, Workflows, Tag-Clouds. Collaboration: Wiki, Forum, Blog, E-Mail, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Subversion client and much more out of the box Portlets like Calculator, Newsfeeds and IFrame. Oracle Application Express Oracle Application Express is a free software development environment based on the Oracle Database as development and runtime environment. It allows fast development of web applications and supports (semi-) automated generation of reports and forms. Oracle APEX contains a lot of wizards for rapid prototyping, it also supports fully customizable themes and templates and offers supporting tools like a visual Query Builder.
Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle E-Business Suite is the most comprehensive suite of integrated, global business applications structured in modules for different business areas and branches. It is based on Oracle key technologies like the Oracle database, the Oracle Application Server and Oracle Forms and Reports. Additionally it is highly customizable and offers flexibility concerning authentication and integration with other software components. A couple of technologies can possibly be used in order to implement additional functionality one of them being APEX. Overall System Architecture Figure 2 shows a typical system architecture that is used when integrating these three components. Note that there are several degrees of freedom here. Depending on security considerations, high availability restrictions and the expected load of the system, there might be only one database instance hosting the data of all three components or there might be even three database instances. Database features like RAC or Data Guard can also be used in this scenario. Figure 2 System architecture for such an integration Integration Tasks and their Solutions We will talk about two integration paths as described above: In the business case of a loose coupling we use Oracle APEX as an intermediary between Liferay Portal and Oracle E-Business Suite. That is a very simple way of integration, because we use Oracle APEX only as vehicle and develop a closed web-based application and embed the result as an encapsulated web application in an HTML IFrameelement implemented as a Portlet or embed the application as a whole subpage in Liferay Portal. In this first scenario, Liferay Portal delivers a portal environment to the end-user and the execution of the embedded IFrame Portlet causes the end user client to send a request to Oracle APEX to get the content of the Portlet. The second solution alternative for such a loose coupling integration scenario deals with the possibility to use the WSRP 2.0 support of Liferay Portal to integrate remote running Portlets. WSRP is approved
as an OASIS standard and is a specification defining a web service interface with presentationoriented web services. From a topological point of view WSRP is one layer above SOAP and offers Service Description, Markup (communication/user-interaction), Registration and Life-Cycle- Management functionality. In this scenario the database (producer) offers web services including operations implemented in PL/SQL and on the other side Liferay Portal (consumer) embeds the remote portlet in the portal environment and delivers it to the end-user. Finally, for a tight integration with the opportunity to pass information between the two participants the so-called Web Content Display Portlet component of Liferay is used. That way any parameter values calculated at runtime can be passed to APEX. To achieve this, the first step is to create a web content structure (an XML schema definition). In this definition elements are defined, such as the APEX URL. In a second step it is necessary to create a template in which an IFrame in html is defined. In this template dynamic content can be inserted. The web content display portlet can now be added to any Liferay page and represents an instance based on structure and template. That way calls to APEX application pages can be parameterized using parameters from the portal context. Figure 3 shows the Liferay configuration page for the portlet to illustrate this approach. Figure 3 Liferay Portal web content display portlet configuration Authentication Liferay Portal supports a build-in authentication with a role-based authorization method and it supports much more standard authentication protocols like LDAP, Active Directory and Open-ID. In our first scenario, the end user client, the web browser, requests Oracle APEX for the content of the Portlet and we have to use web standards (HTTP GET/POST) to pass the authentication- /authorization-information to realize single sign-on in combination with Oracle APEX. In our implementation alternative of the loose coupling scenario, Liferay Portal itself requests for the content of the remote Portlet and the end user gets the whole page at once. The authentication and authorization problem is shifted to a WSRP Consumer-Producer scope (Liferay Portal <-> Database). As said before, WSRP is based on SOAP, so we are able to use the power of SOAP standards and their extensions like WS-Security and WS-Trust or develop an own authentication solution integrated into the application (not recommended). In case of a tighter integration a straightforward approach is to
pass Liferay session information to APEX and evaluate this information there in order to determine if the authentication can be trusted. Layout Liferay Portal is fully customizable. We are able to choose the layout and theme we want to use from a repository or download others and position the portlets per drag and drop at predefined and extensible layouts. The look&feel of the portlets is customizable using inline-editing and live preview. You can also override the globally defined styles on portlet level. But what about styles of integrated Oracle APEX or WSRP Portlets? First of all it is recommended to use the same CSS files (or only global used parts) at Liferay Portal, Oracle APEX and for our WSRP Markups (custom PL/SQL web services). In our first scenario, with Oracle APEX as intermediate, a first step is to clean up the Oracle APEX templates or implement new lightweight templates with HTML-ids/-classes according to the Portlet standards because we do not need functionality like navigation or login in the integrated portlet.the same is true for the approach of the tight integration. In our second scenario it is recommended to implement the management functionality to make the portlet customizable. In WSRP Markup it is also recommended to use the HTML-ids/-classes at custom PL/SQL code as specified in WSRP. If this is done, the WSRP Portlet will use the same CSS file as Liferay Portal because the content of the portlet is fully embedded into Liferay Portal and takes over its styles. Summary In this document it was outlined in what way a third party portal environment (Liferay Portal) can be used in an infrastructure with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Application Express already in place. Such a combination can be achieved in order to add basic portal functionality with all its benefits by making use of base technology already included in the participating components. While describing this, the document had a focus on typical integration tasks such as common authentication, common layout and parameter passing. It was shown that these tasks can be solved in an elegant manner. Contact: Michael Pergande PROMATIS software GmbH Pforzheimer Str. 160 D-76275 Ettlingen Phone: +49 (0) 7243-2179-0 Fax: +49 (0) 7243-2179-99 E-Mail michael.pergande@promatis.de Internet: http://www.promatis.de