Study On Enterprise Portal-based Application Integration

As a solution to the information assembling, categorizing and integrating , Enterprise Portal (EP) provides its users, such as employees, clients, vendors and partners, with a uniform platform to access its internal information. Besides information resources, Enterprise Portal must be able to integrate application systems of all kinds.The key of application integration through Enterprise Portal is to resolve the interoperability between applications. However, each application is represented by a portlet, so it's required to provide the interoperability between different portlets. For portlets, the following three must be met: canonical data model, canonical API and the ability to communicate with each other. All these above have not been supported in the present portlet specification, and it is needed to extend the specification to provide this support.In this paper, we analyzed Portlet Specification, pointed out the insufficiencies, and then proposed an Enterprise Portal-based application integration framework, which was the extension of portlet container . In this framework, applications were wrapped by portlets, so we removed the inconsistency on data models and interfaces. In addition, different portlets could communicate with each other by interacting with the coordination logic of portlet container. In this way, applications could be integrated to work together.Basing on the framework above, we implemented a prototype for application integration in OncePortal, an enterprise portal developed independently by ourselves. Firstly, this prototype extended Portlet API, then provided a canonical data model(IADM) and an interaction model(IAIM) for integrated applications to wrap them. Secondly, coordination logic between portlets could be defined by a set of rules in portlet container, and different applications could communicate indirectly with each other using portlet container as the mediator.Besides, as part of application integration, a kind of single sign-on mechanism specific to EP was also proposed in this paper . Under SSO, users authenticate themselves only once and are logged into applications without further manual interaction. In the prototype framework, we implemented a credential-based SSO sub-system for the application systems which adopted standard authentication mechanism.