Igor Plyakov, Sr. Principal Product Marketing Manager is back to share what's new in Oracle WebCenter Portal: Pagelet Producer.

In February 2012 Oracle released 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6.0) for WebCenter Portal. Pagelet Producer (aka Ensemble) that came out with this release added support for several new capabilities that are described in this post.

As of 11.1.1.5.0 release the Pagelet Producer can expose WSRP and JPDK portlets as pagelets that can then be consumed in any portal or any third-party application that does not have a WSRP consumer. Now Pagelet Producer team is working on simplifying use of pagelets in WebCenter Sites. To expose WSRP portlets a new Producer should be registered with Pagelet Producer which can be done using Enterprise Manager, WLST or the Pagelet Producer Administration Console (for details see Section 25.9 of Administrator’s Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal). If the producer requires authentication, Pagelet Producer allows you to select and use one of standard WSS token profiles.  After registration is finished a new resource is created and automatically populated with pagelets that represent the portlets associated with the WSRP endpoint.  For 11.1.1.6.0 release we completed extensive testing of consuming all WebCenter Services that are exposed as WSRP portlets by E2.0 Producer and delivery them as pagelets to WebCenter Interaction portal.

In Pagelet Producer 11.1.1.6.0 release we added OpenSocial container that allows consuming gadgets from other OpenSocial containers, e.g. iGoogle, and expose them as pagelets. You can also use Pagelet Producer to host OpenSocial gadgets that could leverage OpenSocial APIs that it supports – People, Activities, Appdata and Pub-Sub features. Note that People and Activities expose the People Connections and Activity Stream from WebCenter Portal, i.e. to use these features Pagelet Producer requires connection to WebCenter Portal schema. Pub-Sub allows leveraging OpenAJAX Hub API for inter-gadget communication.

• In addition to these major new additions in Pagelet Producer 11.1.1.6.0 release we also extended several functional modules:
• The Clipping module was extended to support clipping of multiple regions on web resource page and then re-assembly of these separately clipped regions into a single pagelet.
• The auto-login feature can now be applied to web resources protected with Kerberos authentication; you would find this new functionality handy for consuming SharePoint web parts
• The logging module now supports full HTTP traffic between the Pagelet Producer and proxied web resource.

At last, as the rest of WebCenter Portal stack the Pagelet Producer 11.1.1.6.0 can run on IBM WebSphere Application Server.