Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Plumtree Delivers Tools For .NET
And Java Interoperability
Plumtree Software, an enterprise web leader announced the Plumtree
Enterprise
Web Development Kit, a comprehensive set of development tools for using the
Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite to build personalized, interactive applications
from Web services running on different platforms. Based on the Enterprise Web
Suite's new Web services programming interfaces for integration components and
the portal itself, the EDK includes sample code and documentation for Java and
.NET development environments, as well as software that bridges many of the
incompatibilities between Web services that preclude true
interoperability.
In a separate announcement, Plumtree also today launched the Plumtree
Enterprise Web Suite, based on new releases of every major Plumtree product:
the Plumtree Corporate Portal 5.0, Plumtree Search, Plumtree Collaboration
Server 3.0 and Plumtree Content Server 5.0. The Enterprise Web Suite allows
customers to create a volume and variety of Web applications and workspaces,
and manage them in one environment.
To assemble these applications, the portal orchestrates a wide range of Web
services running on industry-standard application servers, for importing
users, profiling users, indexing content and federating searches. By
insulating the developer from platform-specific differences in Web services
implementation, the EDK ensures that all of these services are interoperable,
regardless of the development environment in which they were created.
"Web services are interoperable in theory, but programmers actually
attempting
to make Web services built in Java and Microsoft .NET work together will be
dismayed by the practical difficulties created by different encoding schemes
and different ways to serialize data," said Plumtree Vice President of
Engineering John Hogan. "Plumtree enthusiastically supports the standards
efforts now underway, and has used recommendations from standards bodies such
as WS-I to develop our EDK. This EDK insulates Java and .NET developers from
the irregularities and complexities of Web services, allowing developers to
work in their native environments, building Web services exactly as if they
were native objects. This level of developer support frees developers from
having to make Web services connect to one another, so they can focus instead
on the business logic of the application."
Plumtree customer NetJets has tested the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite, and
is
deploying Plumtree's Enterprise Web Suite as a platform for creating new
applications. Using the Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.5, NetJets created a
flight flow portlet for tracking the status of all planes, and a crew
compliance monitor portlet, which simplifies scheduling. With the Enterprise
Web Suite, NetJets can build richer, individually branded applications that
combine new services with user profile information.
"The Enterprise Web Suite gives us a powerful new set of developer
resources
that will help NetJets advance our vision of using the portal to assemble and
deliver highly personalized applications," said Rob Carr, project manager at
NetJets. "The Enterprise Web Developer Kit allows us to create applications
that integrate a wide range of services and hides much of the development
complexity from our team. Combined with the new flexibility the 5.0 portal
offers for individually tailoring applications to our users, these developer
resources will transform the way NetJets uses the portal to run our business,
from planning flights and crew schedules to streamlining plane
maintenance."
Cross-Platform EDK Insulates Developers from Web Services Complexity
The EDK insulates developers from Web services complexity. In spite of
major
advances in Web services technology, developers continue to face several
significant challenges when developing applications using Web services:
- Because SOAP and WSDL are relatively new technologies, developers are
still
forced to make protocol-level choices when implementing Web services,
resulting in significant differences between implementations of WSDL and SOAP,
and poor interoperability between Java and .NET SOAP toolkits.
- Developers trained in traditional object-oriented programming
techniques face a steep learning curve in adopting Web services
technologies.
- Programming interfaces that were not designed explicitly for use with
SOAP and HTTP tend to perform poorly in actual deployments.
The Plumtree EDK was designed to address these challenges, ensuring
interoperability across Java and .NET implementations. Plumtree's EDK hides
the complexity of SOAP from developers and exposes well-documented, object-
oriented programming interfaces in both Java and .NET environments. Providing
Java and .NET APIs allows programmers to use the tools they already know
without getting mired in the complexities of Web services. Once a developer
chooses the .NET or Java API and begins development of a new portal
application, the Plumtree EDK a layer of abstraction that manages the
communication between the application and the portal, minimizing HTTP requests
to ensure acceptable performance. As a result, developers are able to build
new portal services quickly without having to master the complexities of Web
services.
EDK Helps Customers Deliver Contextualized Applications and Content to
Every
Portal User
The EDK supports a wide range of integration Web services, beyond simple
portlets. To date, development tools from portal vendors have facilitated the
creation of portlets, which embed application services in users' pages. Yet to
create truly powerful applications and workspaces within the portal,
developers will often need to build a much wider range of services, for
integrating search, security, content, and user information. The EDK provides
a new suite of development tools for these critical portal services:
- Profile services import data about users from any system, creating a
universal user profile that facilitates advanced personalization and expert
location;
- Authentication services synchronize with various user directories and
authenticate users, letting organizations easily add customer, partner and
employee users to the portal from different user directories;
- Crawler services identify new content from other repositories, for
indexing in the portal's knowledge directory;
- Search services federate searches to other search engines, combining
the results with Plumtree Search results; and
- Portlets embed application services in personalized and community
portal pages.
To ensure that customers can deliver highly personalized applications and
content to customers, partners and employees, the Enterprise Web Suite
introduces a universal user profile system that allows organizations to import
user data from virtually any system. Combining portal services with user
profile information results in more personalized applications.
For example, by combining user profile information with Siebel data, a
sales
support application delivered through the portal can generate regional sales
updates for each salesperson, with information about his customers. A customer
support application delivered through Plumtree can offer each customer
customized content and searches with only results about the products she has
purchased, based on her profile in a customer database.
"Customers creating a volume of applications on a variety of infrastructure
need tools that support interoperability between components running on
different application servers, coded in different languages," said Plumtree
CEO John Kunze. "The Plumtree Enterprise Web Development Kit lets developers
easily build Web services that range far beyond simple portlets, to create
applications based on components from different systems that nonetheless work
together to offer the user a personalized, highly interactive
application."
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