Portal Services 

Portal services usually include some combination of programming, data, and resources that are accessible to portal applications from the portal runtime (PRT).

The portal services act as the middleware, that is, interfaces that are enabled to exchange procedures and data. They offer functionality to portal components, and other services.

The PRT enables portal services to be used as web services, and also allows portal components and  portal services to access external WEB services via Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files.

The portal services are enabled in the PRT to receive SOAP messages. This implementation includes J2EE Engine, and the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) version 1.0.

SOAP messages are included in the HTTP request to the PRT. As such, integrity checks and authentication processes in the PRT, such as the use of HTTPS protocol and single sign-on (SSO) identification are performed on them. When a user does not have the proper permission to services, calls in the SOAP message are denied.

For detailed information on portal development, go to the SAP Developer Network at sdn.sap.com.

The Portal Development Kit (PDK) available on the SAP Developer Network provides APIs that allow developers to enable portal components to access portal services, and to obtain content or invoke other applications.

For example, using an aggregate of portal services, an iView for suppliers can obtain prices from several vendors, submit an order to a specific vendor, track the status of an order at each processing stage until its arrival.

There are two groups of portal services: the services that are part of the PRT, and the external services that extend the procedures and functionality of the PRT.

External services include the following:

·        Client Eventing

Enables iViews to communicate with each other on the client side, by means of JavaScript and applets.

Client eventing together with other services enable the integration and collaboration of different portal components from several physical servers.

·        Logger

Used to diagnose problems and to generate log messages.

·        URL generator

Provides functions for generating URLs to address.

·        JCO client service

Defines all the actions needed to connect to an SAP system through RFC connections.

·        HTML Business for Java (HTMLB)

Enables the portal to manage themes and styles.

The following is a description of various services in the portal runtime:

·        Caching

Offers services for caching objects in memory. Caching services take care of cluster notification of cache invalidation.

·        Notification

Enables communication among portals in a cluster. It is also used for cache invalidation, and deployment notifications.

·        iView service

Enables the creation of new iViews, gets list of objects, such as systems, layouts, templates, and so on.

It provides the object representing pages, layouts, and iViews (this object is stored in the PCD as JNDI content).

·        Look & Feel

Interfaces with the profile for themes and styling elements obtained from the PCD.

·        Application Repository

This is an internal service for managing the deployment of portal archive (PAR) files.

·        System Landscape

Manages the sources of information, such as find, or create data source.

·        Role, pages, worksets

This service connects to the navigation service for roles, including adding and deleting operations. It also represents the object for roles and worksets in the PCD.

·        Web services

Enables publication, and invocation of a set of services in the Web server, using XML and standard web-based protocols, such as HTTP for transport mechanisms.

Via services, the portal has access to the User Management Engine, Access Control Lists (ACLs), external Web services, connectivity to back-end applications, and other API-based functionality.

The following illustration shows various services exposed in the portal framework:

There are other services not featured in this figure which play an equally important role in the architecture of the portal.

Portal components such as the Page Builder depend on services at runtime to coordinate and process portal elements, including the following:

·        User management and security tasks, for authentication and Single Sign-On

·        Requested object obtained from the Portal Content Directory (PCD)

·        Objects that manage the theme and styles of the portal

·        Framework for determining wizards in the portal

·        Administration of iViews