Integration of Medius Vaadin Common framework to enterprise portals

Miha Strel (2012) Integration of Medius Vaadin Common framework to enterprise portals. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

To cover all aspects of business processes, enterprises today use an array of information technologies, covering information management across different business functions. For the enterprise to ensure employee access to all required information and maximisation of efficiency, a unified access point should be provided. One way of achieving this is by using enterprise portals, which unite grafical user interfaces of different information subsystems on the presentation level, thus giving employees the feeling, that they are using just one system. Portals achieve this by using so–called portlets or programmatic components in the form of graphical user interfaces in which case each portlet represents one functionality of the information subsystem. In order to effectively develop the portlets, we need a development environment and framework, which would enable us to develop software by using only one programming language (for development of client and server side). It would have to be based on the existing enterprise software specifications and should enable us to use different databases, making it possilbe to use the software on different enterprise portals. One example of such framework was developed by Medius® (a company specialising in developing Java based middleware). It was designed for development of classic enterprise applications (not to be a part of portal at first), but at a later point a possibility of integrating it on enterprise portals was also considered. The main question considering the integration was the number of changes required to achieve a fully functional portlet, built on top of this platform. The answer to this question is the main focus point of this thesis. The thesis consists of the introduction to the framework and requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to achieve a successful integration. A simple reference enterprise application built upon the framework is then proposed, as a basis for the integration to enterprise portals. A set of criteria to evaluate the success of integration is also defined. In the central part of the thesis, an attempt of integrating the framework to Liferay Portal® and IBM WebSphere Portal® is described in detail. Each attempt includes the description of establishing the basic environment and the steps of integration, divided among the architectual tiers of the application. Each step contains all the details and changes that have to be considered at each tier. Each attempt of integration is followed by an evaluation. As it turns out, integration can be successfully achieved on both enterprise portals. In each case, the needed changes to achieve this are minimal and in both cases refer to differences between the implementation of certain specifications at the data and business tier (most have to do with differences between application servers). This means that the framework itself does not have to be altered in a way, that would require us to rewrite large portions of code and can be used for the development of software for enterprise portals.

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