I want to thank John over at John’s Blog again for posting about the white paper you see below. I posted a reply on his site but also wanted to expand a bit on a couple things.
One of the reasons we leveraged CIS for the integration (besides what was outlined in the paper) is due to security and network architecture. John linked to a great article about using Site Studio 10gr4 from external 
applications and mentioned that to implement this functionality you call the UCM services directly over HTTP. This is a great way to do it and makes the integration very straightforward, however, the customers where we have implemented the Fishbowl Portlets were using their portal technology to present a public facing site. In this instance the UCM server that is serving the content was always behind a firewall where the client’s browser could not access it on port 80 or 443. Opening a secure socket connection between servers ended up being a much easier sell to IT Security.
So what about that great 10gr4 functionality, in particular the WCM_PLACEHOLDER service call? We integrated it anyway. We added a new method to the CIS Wrapper class mentioned in the paper that uses the Administrative API in CIS to make a standard service call. The rendered HTML from the placeholder comes back in the binder and we return that out to the portlets. The placeholder is one of 4 current configurable options for consumption on the content portlet (there is also a search/list display portlet).
- Native HTML/Text content
- Dynamic Conversion (with image caching)
- Site Studio 10gR3 data file element
- Site Studio 10gR4 placeholder
I personally love the placeholder option since it allows us to pull in any asset built in Site Studio 10gR4 to build out a site in portal.
More to come on the portlets, stay tuned!
