Local portlets in webcenter

Question

I'm starting to develop a portal with webcenter 10.3.5 (latest version) and from what I could gather I can only consume portlets through WSRP even if they are local. I would not like to incur in performance problems so I'm trying to find alternatives for local portlets maintaining the customization capabilities of webcenter (add remove portlets to a page in webcenter composer for example). In my case what is the best solution to maintain the portlet paradigm and at the same time do not incur into performance problems ?

As a side note I have made some investigations and I know that I can expose ADF taskflows as portlets, for now I think it's the only way. I was wondering if there's another way of doing it...

Giving a little more detail the portal that we are designing is a selfcare portal for a telecommunications company that has a reasonable number of customers. Most of the time they will not engage in long transactions, they want to accomplish some task like topping up a cell phone, send an SMS, swap pricing plan etc. From a business point of view they want to share portlets between this and other portals that they have. My first and probably utopic approach was to consider everything as a portlet, since all the requirements were designed with that in mind, i.e. everything should be reusable. However I'm having a hard time finding online references for sites that were built like this in webcenter using only portlets accessed through the wsrp protocol. We also have requirements that state that some portlets should appear according with some rules that change from client to client so everything will be very dynamic. Also in some cases they want to configure via webcenter composer the portlets that a page should display. Considering all of this I'm wondering if it's reasonable to consider an approach were everything is composed with wsrp portlets. The alternative from my point of view is to do a mix i.e. some parts are portlets accessed through the wsrp protocol namely external portlets the others are taskflows which can be also composed also through webcenter composer

Answer 1

Based on your question (talking about WSRP and ADF) I assume you're talking about WebCenter Portal. Just for clarity, the current version of WebCenter Portal is 11.1.1.4 (11g Patch Set 3).

As for your questions on portlets and other reusable components:

WebCenter Portal doesn't have a local portlet concept, all portlets are remote, and can be accessed through WSRP. This is beneficial, because you can scale out your portlets independently of your portal (consumer). At the same time, there's a certain amount of overhead (and this is what you seem to be concerned about), as well as management complexities. When using such a recent version of the product, I wouldn't be overly concerned about the WSRP overhead.

However, if this is a major issue for you, you can always consider using native ADF task flows. These are local components, no SOAP overhead when executing them. At the same time, they're executed sequentially (unlike portlets that are running in parallel).

And as you mentioned in your question, you can expose ADF task flows as JSR 286 portlets as well (again, for remote consumption through WSRP 2.0).

Here you find a couple of useful data posts as well on the topic.

Hope this helps...