Develop > Presentation layer > WebSphere Commerce integration with WebSphere Portal
WebSphere Commerce Portal development environment
The WebSphere Commerce Portal development environment uses Rational Application Developer 7.5 as the workbench tool for coding, testing, and debugging the MVCPortlet application. Since WebSphere Commerce Developer edition also uses the same version of the workbench, it is possible to have both the development environment coexist within the same workspace.
There are three possible development environment configurations for WebSphere Commerce Portal integration:
- Web developer
- Uses a dedicated workspace for WebSphere Portal development. This workspace only includes MVCPortlet and other WebSphere Portal related projects. WebSphere Commerce server is running on another machine to provide the required backend business services support while testing with the MVCPortlet application. The advantages of this setup include less overall memory consumption and isolation of the the two separate development roles: web developer and component developer.
- Component developer
- Focuses only on backend WebSphere Commerce component services, and can use WebSphere Commerce Developer to perform tasks.
- Team leader
- Oversees the entire project integration and requires access to both the frontend interface and backend component services. This role requires both the MVCPortlet and the WebSphere Commerce Developer on the same workbench. This is the most complicated setup and has a higher memory consumption requirement since both WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal servers can run at the same time.
Create a portlet project
Rational Application Developer includes tools designed to help develop portlet applications for WebSphere Portal.
See Portlet development overview for more information.
Customize portlets to display WebSphere Commerce content
- Add or customizing a portlet using MVCPortlet
- Retrive data from WebSphere Commerce service modules using the GetData tag
- Create a portlet render in MVCPortlet
- Create a portlet action that uses WebSphere Commerce services
- Link portlets with portlet wires
- Create custom portlet event handlers in MVCPortlet
Test, debugging, or profiling a portlet
Similar to testing a portal project, the Rational Application Developer workbench can also be used for testing or debugging a portlet project. This task involves running the portlet project against either locally on a test environment within the workbench, or attach remotely to a separate server.
Portal tools provide an additional type of server configuration called the portal server configuration, which contains the server configuration information needed to publish the portlet application on a WebSphere Portal machine. After it is published, the target portlet appears on a preview page in the WebSphere Portal server. Source-level debugging is also supported.
See Test and debugging portlets for more information.
Publish a portlet
A portlet project can either be deployed to a WebSphere Portal server automatically or manually.
See Publish portlets for more information.
- Setup the WebSphere Commerce Portal development environment
You can develop and test WebSphere Commerce Portal configurations using the development environment.
- Create a WebSphere Commerce sample portal page on WebSphere Portal
This list highlights the main tasks involved for creating a WebSphere Commerce sample portal page on WebSphere Portal. This sample portal page consists of a set of portlets that demonstrate some of the WebSphere Commerce capabilities through WebSphere Portal. These WebSphere Commerce portlets, when working together using cooperative portlet wires, provide online shoppers with a similar shopping experience to that of the WebSphere Commerce Madisons starter store, while providing merchants with additional online business sales channels to other portal environments. Each of these portlets provide a unique set of WebSphere Commerce functionality that can be further customized by business partners, integrators and customers.