Weird how familiar Portal seems
April 13, 2006So I’m in my third week at the new job, trying to soak up as much as possible about developing in Oracle Portal. The weird thing is, even though I’m totally new to a lot of the technologies (J2EE, Oracle Forms, PL/SQL, etc.) there’s something strangely familiar about Portal. The reason is that conceptually, it’s an awful lot like the in-house publishing system built at my former employer.
The core concept that they share is the notion of creating a page by assembling components from multiple servers. They both use http to accomplish that assembly, they both have a front-end Web server that’s logically and (potentially) physically separate from the application servers. They also both try to separate logic modules from presentation modules but they also both fail to enforce that separation. In both systems it’s entirely possible to write all your application logic in a bunch of JSP’s instead of making the JSP’s just HTML with a smattering of JSP tags.
They differ most notably in a couple places. First is complexity–the CNET in-house system is much simpler than Portal. There’s just a few XML files you need to configure to install a new application page. Whereas Portal is a full-blown J2EE system so you have to do all that packaging to deploy even the simplest “hello, world” type of application.
Or use a tool that does the packaging for you. And that’s the other place where they differ–the in-house CNET system has essentially zero tool support, unless you count vi and grep as tools. On the other hand Portal has an almost bewildering array of tools and software that support it. I’m especially fond of JDeveloper, the IDE that Oracle provides. It has pretty solid database integration–just yesterday I was creating tables in our dev db directly thru JDeveloper. So the same IDE where you do your Java coding can be used to handle some of the back-end database chores as well.
Of the two I found the CNET system much easier to code in, but Oracle Portal is much more flexible. And of course Portal is the better skill to have on your resume 