ADF/Portal interview with Peter Moskovits

The company I am with and I interviewed Peter Moskovits, and got some questions answered we had about migration path of Oracle Portal 10g users and how to integrate the changing versions of ADF, which version of WSRP to use in which case, etc. Here are part of the minutes to the meeting:

Peter started with an overview of the Oracle products and product direction. Peter noted that Portal technology is a decade older than ADF technology, so efforts to merge them are challenging. Peter mentioned that there are a couple of kinds of portlets at work here: PDK Java Portlets, and WSRP/JSR168 Portlets. The latter is where the future is. In each case each technology offers something the other does not have, so Oracle promotes both. With Portal you have features such as runtime customization, reusable portlets, and content integration. So you can include portlets into ADF using WebCenter technology, or you can bring ADF portlets over and consume them WSRP 1.0 or 2.0 using JSF Portlet Bridge technology.

Regarding Portlet Bridge licensing…Peter says that there are two kinds of licensing for WebCenter: a WebCenter services license (meant mostly for developers) and a suite license (to get everything). The services license would be cheaper also than the suite license. If the Portlet Bridge was the only part of WebCenter that you were using, it sounded like you should get WebCenter Services license which is cheaper. The Portlet Bridge enables communication with OAS/OC4J 10.1.3.4 to obtain exposed portlets through WSRP portlet producer. If we are using 10g portal (OAS 10.1.2.0.2/Portal 10.1.4), we would need to use WSRP 1.0 (I have a question out to Peter to know if we could use ADF Faces (10g) PPR features with WSRP 1.0 or not).

Peter acknowledged that if you had to use OAS 10.1.2.0.2/Portal 10.1.4 that you would be much better off if you deployed your portletized 10g ADF Faces apps to OAS 10.1.3.4, and then consumed them with the 10.1.2.0.2 server with WSRP 1.0; rather than deploying directly to OAS 10.1.2.0.2 and having to dumb your 10g ADF Faces app down from 10.1.3.x down to 10.1.2 technology (J2EE 1.3/JDK 1.4 from J2EE 1.4/JDK 1.5).

We should not deploy portlets with the SOAP provider if we are using ADF; we should use the JSF Portlet Bridge. SOAP was only for Struts applications.

Peter and Jay both let me know that deploying a 10g ADF program was no big deal: a 3-step process, that was well documented in the 10g WebCenter Developer’s Guide.