Assembling composite applications
A composite application is a collection of components that address a business need for a particular group of users. The collection of business components provides predefined meta-data and content that supports integrated business capabilities for personal and team productivity. The integration of information from multiple business components provides application users with content specifically geared to their business roles and tasks.
For example, the business components in a composite application might include a people finder, a document library, a project team room, and personal information management components such as mail, calendar, and address book. Assembled from templates and deployed using services such as personalization, collaboration, and search, composite applications can be reused and customized for flexible quick start to projects without reliance on administrator support.
Application templates are intended for personnel in a business unit of the enterprise who understand the business model and business processes. Application templates promote the rapid assembly and reuse of composite applications. Business analysts and application designers can create and manage templates for composite applications. Application managers and business users can create composite applications from templates and, when appropriate, save new applications as templates for reuse by other users. From the product banner, click Applications > Templates to display the Welcome page and two additional pages, Template Library and Application Library.
- Use the Template Library to view, create, and manage templates for composite applications.
- Use the Application Library to view, create, and manage instances of composite applications that have been assembled from templates.
The Application Template Library and Applications catalog portlets are not supported as Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP).
Review the Composite Applications Tuning scenarios in the WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management 6.1.x Performance Tuning Guide to learn how to improve composite application infrastructure performance. This is particularly important when you have a large number of applications with many pages and portlets.
Composite Applications Tuning scenarios
- Users, tasks, and tools
Preview how users in your enterprise might use various tools to perform tasks for delivering composite applications, application components, and application templates.
- Configure mail service
You can configure the e-mail notification for new community members for composite application communities.
- Work with application templates
Use the Application Template Library to create and manage templates for composite applications. From the Application Template Library, you can create a new template and, thereby, become its owner.
You can also import a template definition and customize it.
- Work with applications
Use the applications catalog to create, manage, and open composite applications. To work with a composite application, use the actions that are available to you on the application page menu. From the product banner, click Applications > Templates; then click the Application Library tab to work with the applications catalog. From an open application, click the page menu to see the application actions that are available to you.
- Work with policies for composite applications
Use Resource Policies to create and manage policies for composite applications. Policies provide an efficient way for administrators and application managers to monitor and manage application lifecycle.
- Composite application concepts
Refer to these concepts as needed when you work with application templates and applications.
- Composite Applications REST services
Application developers can use Representational State Transfer (REST) services to obtain and modify composite application resources remotely, that is from clients that are outside the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) of the server. These services use feeds that are based on the Atom Syndication Format and on HTTP-based Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to expose and update resources.
Related information
Composite applications
Building Composite Applications