Oracle9iAS Portal Developer Kit (PDK)
How to Navigate the PDK by Component Areas

The Portal Develop Kit (PDK) documentation can be navigated by various PDK component areas at the Portal Studio.  As compared to navigation by Lifecycle, navigation by component areas is more natural if you are already familiar with the PDK, and if you are specifically interested in certain functionalities offered by the PDK.  If you are a beginner you might want to try navigation by Lifecycle first.  The section on "Getting Started" at the Portal Studio might also be a great way to be acquainted with the PDK.   The component areas are a subset of the Develop section.

Component Areas

A brief summary of several component areas are described below:

• Writing Portlets

This section has links to articles on how to turn existing components into portlets.  You can find how to develop portlets for Oracle9iAS Portal using various languages such as Java/J2EE, Perl, C++, ASP, etc.  If you are interested in portal or portlet standardization efforts, you will also find points to WSRP, WSIA, JCP168, etc. here.

• User Interface

You can learn about the technologies supported by the PDK for building your portlet's user interface in this section.  Covered here are topics on internationalization, browser technologies such as HTML, Javascript, CSS, XSL, and Flash, convenience utilities such as URL rewriting, and error handling.

• Session Management

This section covers the important subject of session management and shows you the ease that the PDK enables you to implement session in your portlets and portals.

• Information Storage

Customization and preference information are stored and retrieved from your portlets.  Oracle9iAS Portal allows you to store these information in files or databases.  In here, you will learn how these are performed using the PDK.

• Parameters and Events

You can develop reusable portlets that push content to other portlets and pages.  This section discusses these Oracle9iAS technologies based on parameters and events.

• Performance

Learn how you can optimize the performance of your portlets and providers in this section. Covered are topics on scalability such as load balancing and failover, and on caching design, web cache, etc.

• Security

This section discusses the powerful security framework that is in Oracle9iAS Portal.  You will learn about securing your servlets using single sign-on, and security your application using JAAS (and Oracle's JAZN implemementation).

• API Documentation

The PDK API documentation is contained in this component area.

You can find many other component areas in the Develop section.