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/

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

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

What is this talk about?

•  Enterprise Portals

•  As the user interface

–  for your

•  Services Oriented Architecture

SOA?

•  Services oriented architecture

•  Around what services is the architecture oriented?

SOAPy Web Services

http://www.flickr.com/photos/artventuresgallery/183441998/

Formal Web Services

•  WSDL

•  SOAP

•  UDDI

•  WS-Security

•  WS-*

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ennor/353215962/

Example: MyCourses

•  Sakai Web Services

•  MyCourses Portlet

MyCourses Portlet

MyCourses Portlet

Application-specific Web Services

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/3497657769/

Standards and Interoperability

•  LISv2 SIS LMS SIS integration?

•  Sakora

SOA - Services

•  Self-contained units of functionality

•  Reusable

•  Stateless

•  Loose coupling

•  Interoperable

•  Discoverable

•  Orchestration

Services in the Wild

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenera/1613856609/

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?

RSS

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

What exposes RSS?

•  Email lists

•  News sources

•  Social networking sites

•  Wikis and websites

•  Change logs

•  What doesn’t expose RSS?

iCal / xCal feeds

http://www.flickr.com/photos/malabooboo/2405993368/

What exposes calendar feeds?

•  Google Calendar

•  Conferences

•  SIS modeling of course schedules

•  LMS modeling of course meetings

•  Event calendars (e.g. Bedework)

XML

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralphtq/3157588757/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lambdageek/40535379/

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

What exposes XML?

•  What can you convince to expose XML?

What generates email?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sirstick/76498325/

Email

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

Email

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

Announcements / Alerts

!

How users interact with services?

•  Google

•  Thunderbird etc.

Consuming iCal Feeds in Google

Enterprise Portals

Enterprise Portals

•  Aggregate Content & Applications

•  Customization & Personalization

•  Access Control

•  Consistent User Experience

Enterprise portals support:

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

Aggregation

Aggregation

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

Personalization

Student

Personalization

Faculty

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

Unauthenticated View

Authenticated View

Delegated Authentication

•  CAS Proxy Tickets

•  Shibboleth Delegated SAML Assertions

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36688133@N00/2894794151/

Portlets as Composite UIs for Services

•  RSS Reader Portlet

•  Calendar Portlet

•  Tabbed RSS Reader Portlet

•  Jasig Announcements Portlet

•  Jasig IMAP Reader Portlet

•  XML / XSLT

RSS Reader Portlet

Tabbed RSS Reader Portlet

Calendar Portlet

Calendar Portlet

Calendar Portlet

Calendar Portlet

Calendar Portlet

Jasig Announcements Portlet

Jasig IMAP Email Reader Portlet

Google Gadgets in uPortal

SQL Query

Graph of SQL Query

Graph of SQL query

XML / XSLT transformation

•  XML

•  Transformed via XSLT

•  To Markup Presented in Portal

Jasig Announcements Portlet

Strategies for Effective SOA

•  Re-usable composite service-consuming UIs

•  Purpose-built “mashups” of services

•  User-facing services

–  Self-service widgets

Mashup examples

•  Courses on campus map

•  Course reserves

User-facing Services via the Enterprise Portal

What about the other ‘Services’

•  News and Announcements/Messaging

•  Applications/Workflow/Tools

User-Centric, not Developer-Centric

Services users need quickly and frequently

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)

JSR168/286 - Portlets

Actual software applications, written in Java. •  Provides a standard pattern for developers •  Independent of Portal platform •  Reusable •  Shareable

WebProxy

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

Web Proxies at Wisconsin

Web Proxy of Conference Website

RSS Reader

Render RSS feeds

RSS Reader

Inline Frames

Sure is easy…

Single Sign On

Via Credential Replay Or via enterprise SSO solutions, like CAS and Shibboleth.

Deep Linking

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

Examples of Portals in Higher Education

Some Portlets (UIs to services)

Portal UIs to file shares

Portal as Service Delivery Platform

One place for Open Source Portlets

•  www.jasig.org/portlets

Andrew Petro

apetro@unicon.net

www.unicon.net

Questions?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/