Slides from Andrew Petro's 02 December 2009 Unicon webinar on the Enterprise Portal as the User Interface to the Services Oriented Architecture.

1. Enterprise Portals as
the User Interface of
Service Oriented
Architecture
Andrew Petro
Software Developer
02 December 2009
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

2. About Unicon
IT Consulting Services for Education, Specializing in Open Source
Software Consulting Services
• Technology Delivery and Support
• Systems Integration
• Software Engineering
Open Source Technology Solutions
• Enterprise Portal
• Identity Management
• Learning Management
• Email and Collaboration
For more information about Unicon, please visit: http://www.unicon.net
Contact us at: 480-558-2400 or info@unicon.net

3. Upcoming Webinars
• Secure Your Systems From Within: Two-Factor
Authentication in Higher Education
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific)
• Identity Management Overview
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific)
• Liferay Enterprise Portal Overview
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific)
For more events, visit: http://www.unicon.net/company/news/events

4. What is this talk about?
• Enterprise Portals
• As the user interface
– for your
• Services Oriented Architecture

5. SOA?
• Services oriented architecture
• Around what services is the architecture
oriented?

6. SOAPy Web Services
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
artventuresgallery/183441998/

7. Formal Web Services
• WSDL
• SOAP
• UDDI
• WS-Security
• WS-*
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ennor/
353215962/

8. Example: MyCourses
• Sakai Web Services
• MyCourses Portlet

9. MyCourses Portlet

10. MyCourses Portlet

11. Application-specific Web Services
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/
3497657769/

12. Standards and Interoperability
• LISv2 SIS  LMS  SIS integration?
• Sakora

13. SOA - Services
• Self-contained units of functionality
• Reusable
• Stateless
• Loose coupling
• Interoperable
• Discoverable
• Orchestration

14. Services in the Wild
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenera/
1613856609/

15. Services exposed (or exposable)
• Systems and web applications already
expose oodles of lightweight services
• You can easily make them expose more
lightweight services
• Probably more easily than getting the
applications to expose formal web services?
• WOA?

16. RSS
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanvan/
267789848/

17. What exposes RSS?
• Email lists
• News sources
• Social networking sites
• Wikis and websites
• Change logs
• What doesn’t expose RSS?

18. iCal / xCal feeds
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malabooboo/
2405993368/

19. What exposes calendar feeds?
• Google Calendar
• Conferences
• SIS modeling of course schedules
• LMS modeling of course meetings
• Event calendars (e.g. Bedework)

20. XML
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralphtq/
3157588757/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lambdageek/
40535379/

21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/
3077990150/

22. What exposes XML?
• What can you convince to expose XML?

23. What generates email?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sirstick/
76498325/

25. Email
http://www.flickr.com/photos/m-c/2250563337/

26. Email
http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/481408986/

27. Announcements / Alerts
!

28. How users interact with services?
• Google
• Thunderbird etc.

29. Consuming iCal Feeds in Google

30. Enterprise Portals

31. Enterprise Portals
• Aggregate Content & Applications
• Customization & Personalization
• Access Control
• Consistent User Experience

32. Aggregation
• View or path to everything in the Enterprise (content,
applications, services)
– Simple deep links to websites
– Dashboard-style display of services
– Applications running within the portal
• Provides user with a single centralized place to start
• Entry point for single sign-on architecture

33. Aggregation

34. Aggregation

35. Personalization
• User needs vary within an Enterprise
• The more that is understood about a user the greater the ability
of the portal to display services and content most relevant to
that user.
– Groups
– Roles
– Attributes
• Enables user to customize their view of the portal to suit their
own preferences.
– Ability to add/remove elements from the portal layout
– Ability to change how portal elements are organized
– Ability to configure details of individual portal elements

36. Personalization
Student

37. Personalization
Faculty

38. Access Control
• Enterprise portals provide a way to control access to
individual elements
• Individual user access based on:
– Group
– Role
– Attribute
• Services not accessible for a user are not displayed
in the portal for that user
• Access control for accessible elements are
managed by the portal

39. Unauthenticated View

40. Authenticated View

41. Delegated Authentication
• CAS Proxy Tickets
• Shibboleth Delegated
SAML Assertions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
36688133@N00/2894794151/

42. Portlets as Composite UIs for Services
• RSS Reader Portlet
• Calendar Portlet
• Tabbed RSS Reader Portlet
• Jasig Announcements Portlet
• Jasig IMAP Reader Portlet
• XML / XSLT

43. RSS Reader Portlet

44. Tabbed RSS Reader Portlet

45. Calendar Portlet

46. Calendar Portlet

47. Calendar Portlet

48. Calendar Portlet

49. Calendar Portlet

50. Jasig Announcements Portlet

51. Jasig IMAP Email Reader Portlet

52. Google Gadgets in uPortal

53. SQL Query

54. Graph of SQL Query

55. Graph of SQL query

56. XML / XSLT transformation
• XML
• Transformed via XSLT
• To Markup Presented in Portal

57. Jasig Announcements Portlet

58. Strategies for Effective SOA
• Re-usable composite service-consuming UIs
• Purpose-built “mashups” of services
• User-facing services
– Self-service widgets

59. Mashup examples
• Courses on campus map
• Course reserves

60. User-facing Services via the Enterprise Portal

61. What about the other ‘Services’
• News and Announcements/Messaging
• Applications/Workflow/Tools
User-Centric, not Developer-Centric

62. How to expose services
1. JSR168/286 Portlets
2. WebProxy
3. RSS
4. Inline frames
5. SQL Queries
6. SSO
7. Deep Linking (shortcut into apps/content)

63. JSR168/286 - Portlets
Actual software applications, written in Java.
• Provides a standard pattern for developers
• Independent of Portal platform
• Reusable
• Shareable

64. WebProxy
Portlet retrieves, transforms, and presents
any web application you like.*

65. Web Proxies at Wisconsin

66. Web Proxy of Conference Website

67. RSS Reader
Render RSS feeds

68. RSS Reader

69. Inline Frames
Sure is easy…

70. Single Sign On
Via Credential
Replay
Or via enterprise
SSO solutions, like
CAS and
Shibboleth.

71. Deep Linking
Portal as discovery layer for the user-facing
services proliferated across your campus.

72. Examples of Portals in Higher Education

75. Some Portlets (UIs to services)

76. Portal UIs to file shares

77. Portal as Service Delivery Platform

78. One place for Open Source Portlets
• www.jasig.org/portlets

79. Questions?
Andrew Petro
apetro@unicon.net
www.unicon.net
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/
3.0/us/