SCORE® Adaptive Bridges™ – the latest version of Delta’s proven legacy integration technology that enables you to increase the value of your enterprise projects by reducing the cost of integrating your existing application assets into your enterprise portal project.

Custom Portlets

The first steps in an enterprise portal project are easy – use vendor-supplied portlets for your office productivity applications and standard packages.

Portlets are components, managed by an enterprise portlet container, that process requests and generate dynamic content. Enterprise portals use portlets as pluggable user interface components that provide a presentation layer to local and remote systems.

Things start to get more complicated, however, as your enterprise portal project expands to include your legacy applications. You now need to start thinking about developing custom Java portlets.

JSR 168 Java Portlet Specification

Each enterprise portal vendor has traditionally provided a proprietary interface for developing custom portlets. Portlets have not been portable between vendors and developer productivity has been limited by the need to learn the special features and tricks of each new platform.

To solve this issue, the Java Community Process developed the JSR 168 specification for interoperability between Java portlets and enterprise portals. APIs are included in the JSR 168 specification for aggregation, personalization, presentation and security of portlets.

Adoption of the JSR 168 specification is advancing rapidly, with initial implementations available or announced by IBM, Oracle, eXo platform, Plumtree, SAP, Vignette and others.

Legacy Integration

The JSR 168 Java portlet specification focuses on how the Java portlet interacts with the enterprise portal container. Unfortunately, it does not address the practical issues of integrating with existing legacy application and databases.

Take one example – a JSR 168 Java portlet is always a single instance and must behave in a stateless manner. This makes the integration with your transactional and conversational legacy applications and databases much more complex.

What we need is an integration solution that allows you to concentrate on the presentation logic for your custom portlets, and that hides the (necessary) complexity to integrate your existing legacy applications and databases.

Schorch - Automatic Service Enablement with SCORE Adaptive Bridges Schorch quickly and easily integrate their mainframe legacy applications into their enterprise portal using SCORE Adaptive Bridges from Delta Software Technology.

SCORE Adaptive Bridges

SCORE Adaptive Bridges is an open-standards based solution to quickly and easily integrate your unique and valuable legacy applications and databases into your enterprise portal project.

Building on the solid foundation of your existing legacy applications and databases, SCORE Adaptive Bridges quickly and easily generates JSR 168 compliant Java portlets that are able to react to evolving and changing requirements. Experience shows that integration is a process, not a one-time event.

All of the legacy server, database and transport features of SCORE Adaptive Bridges are completely independent of the usage within an enterprise portal environment. These subjects are not covered further here. Please see the Delta Web site for further information.

JSR 168 Java Portlet Run-Time Architecture

SCORE Adaptive Bridges generates ready-to-run JSR 168 Java portlets using the well-known ModelViewController (MVC) design pattern, a commonly used architecture for user interfaces:

• Controller – The main portlet class, implemented in Java, the Controller instantiates the Model and then passes requests and responses to the View. The controller can be used “as is” or extended to meet specific application needs.
• Model – The Model is implemented as a Java class or JavaBean and encapsulates the services provided by the legacy application or database. SCORE Adaptive Bridges generates the View as a special version of the Adaptive Proxy.
• View – The View is implemented as a Java Server Page (JSP), using a mixture of Java code and HTML. The View builds the user interface as an HTML fragment that is assembled into the final Web page by the enterprise portal container. SCORE Adaptive Bridges generates a sample View that can be used for testing, and that serves as the basis of the real user interface for the portlet.

SCORE Adaptive Bridges automatically generates the necessary deployment descriptors that are required to deploy the custom portlet into the enterprise portal container run-time environment.

SCORE Adaptive Bridges - Enterprise Portals An enterprise portal can only deliver its true potential for reducing costs and increasing value when your strategic legacy applications are available in the portal environment.

Want to Learn More?

To learn more about SCORE Adaptive Bridges and enterprise portals please contact your local sales representative.