WebCenter Development Environment – Minimum and Recommended Requirements

The other day a question was posted on the Oracle WebCenter Suite Group on LinkedIn about the minimum and recommended requirements for the WebCenter development environment.

Before considering what the actual hardware requirements are, it makes sense to quickly glance through what we mean by the development environment, what needs to be installed, and what are the things you can do. In addition, you should also consider what back-end servers are needed and whether those are required or optional.

To make it easier, here is a slide that gives a high-level overview of the WebCenter development environment (click on it to enlarge it).

First, you have to install JDeveloper with the WebCenter Extension (through Help > Check for Updates). This will allow you to do a lot of things, including:

• build customizable applications with Composer
• build, deploy, and test JSR 168 portlets
• consume WSRP 1.0 and WSRP 2.0 portlets
• integrate content from your file system (for development and testing purposes)
• test search

In addition, most enterprises have an IMAP or MS Exchange Email server hosted, that you can connect to and integrate into your applications.

If you need social computing services, such as discussions, wikis, blogs, you need to install the back-end servers for these services. If you would like to leverage people connection, tagging, linking, you will need a DB.

Now, to get to the original question: what is the minimum/ideal requirement to run all this: if all you need to run is JDeveloper with the WebCenter extension, 2GB RAM should be sufficient. If you want to fire up an XE database on your laptop, and want to run multiple browsers with email and MS Office on it, you should have 4GB RAM (and ideally an O/S that can see all of it). As for hard disk: JDeveloper requires somewhat more than 1GB, and the WebCenter Extension is in the 200MB range. So you can count with 2GB as the absolute minimum.

Last but not least, a monitor with good resolution, possibly an external monitor (or two) doesn’t hurt either.

Quick Intro to Oracle WebCenter on YouTube

If you only have a few minutes to find out what WebCenter is all about, this may be for you…

A colleague here at Oracle, Claudio Lichtenthal, published a number of brief white boarding sessions on YouTube. His latest creation covers WebCenter.

New WebCenter Skin by Bluestudios

John Sim from Bluestudios built yet another beautiful skin for WebCenter Spaces. The screen shot below takes you to his post for more details – and a personal touch…

Step-by-step Instructions to Install and Configure WebCenter Spaces

There’s a new Oracle By Example (OBE) available on OTN that covers the end-to-end installation and configuration steps for WebCenter Spaces. Following the “OBE traditions”, every step is illustrated with a screen shot.

Updated White Paper on Extending WebCenter Spaces

Most of our customers deploying WebCenter Spaces are interested in changing various aspects of their deployment. We have just released on OTN the updated Extending WebCenter Spaces (11.1.1.2.0) white paper (supporting files 25MB). The executive overview of the paper gives a good summary of what it’s all about:

Oracle WebCenter Spaces is a pre-built, pre-integrated, and highly customizable enterprise application that provides new facilities to enable social communities within the enterprise. As you begin using WebCenter Spaces, you may find that you want to customize the navigational controls, look and feel, and other aspects of this application. For example, you might want to provide a customized resource catalog with content that better reflects your organization or a departmental requirement.

And here is the list of capabilities covered in the paper:

• Deploy your own skins – Build and deploy your own skins to brand your WebCenter Spaces environment with the look and feel you choose.
• Customize the resource catalog – Add new task flows to the WebCenter Spaces resource catalog, filter out content, and reorganize the folder structure to make it easy for your users to find the content they need.
• Add custom task flows – Develop specialized task flows in JDeveloper and make them available to your WebCenter Spaces users.
• Deploy new page styles – Use WebCenter Spaces’ own pre-built page styles, such as three-column or navigation, or create your own. You decide which page styles to make available to users.
• Change the public welcome page (and login area) – Modify the default content, or replace the entire page with content specific to your installation, or change the default login form to a login link.
• Create and deploy new site templates – Create and deploy new site templates for WebCenter Spaces page. Alternatively, customize the out-of-box site templates to suite your installation.
• Rename the Personal Space tab – Choose a different name for Personal Spaces, the private work areas in WebCenter Spaces.
  
• Filter Languages – Reduce the range of locales/languages available in your application.

WebCenter Avitek Sample Portal

The Avitek Sample Portal is a custom portal built using Oracle WebCenter 11g Release 1 and WebCenter Web 2.0 Services. In addition to the source of the sample, it also comes with a Developer’s Guide.
Avitek is intended for customers and partners who want to start building custom WebCenter portals quickly. If you have JDeveloper and the WebCenter 11g extension, you’ll have Avitek running in less than 10 minutes. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll have it running in less than an hour.
Avitek focuses primarily on site management, content driven templates, and customizable pages. It leverages WebCenter Services for page creation, page customization, and content integration. It showcases different approaches to building site navigation and publishing content.

Important Note: If you are using WebCenter 11gR1 Patch Set 1, due to a bug (to be fixed in the next release) you have to do the following work-around:

1. Shutdown JDeveloper
2. Copy Avitek/SiteModel/deploy/avitek-site-model.jar to
$ORACLE_HOME/jdeveloper/jdev/lib/patches directory
3. Restart JDeveloper

WebCenter REST API Sample

The People Connection service is one of the most exciting features of the Patch Set 1 release. It allows you to build and manage your connections, as well as to monitor the activity stream in a snappy, intuitive UI.

Bob Fraser from the WebCenter Product Management team published a new sample on OTN demonstrating the REST APIs offered by the People Connection service. The main idea about REST-enabling the social computing services is to allow you to build alternative UIs interacting with the WebCenter back-end services. In Bob’s example you have a simple HTML form where you enter your status message, and it posts your status through the REST APIs to the People Connection service.

Here is how it works:

1. Invoke the URL that hosts the sample, for example: http://myhost.com/updatestatus/updateStatus.html
2. Provide your status update and submit the form
3. Navigate to your WebCenter Gallery page, and confirm that your status has been updated. The changed status shows up in the Activity Stream as well. The Spaces screen shot above (click to enlarge) shows just that.

Very cool…

Two-day WebCenter Training

Be among the first ones who attend the brand new 2-day WebCenter Training, titled: Oracle WebCenter 11g: Introduction to Custom Applications. This is a so-called Live Virtual Class (LVC), that is: you have a live instructor teaching the class, but there’s no travel required; you can attend the class remotely. Here you can enroll.

About the class

This course introduces you to Oracle WebCenter’s components and teaches you how to add these components to any application to create content-rich, collaborative, customizable applications. In this course you start with an ADF application, then enhance it with features from WebCenter Framework, Composer, and Services. Using Oracle JDeveloper with the embedded WebCenter Framework extension, you learn how to add portlets, documents, discussion forums, tags, links, and search to the existing application. You also learn how to enable users to compose and edit WebCenter application pages at run time. Solving the practices results in a small, concise, feature-rich WebCenter application.

Learn to:

• Use predefined WebCenter task flows to add documents, discussions, tags, links and searching to custom application
• Wire traditional ADF components, WebCenter task flows and portlets to display correlated information
• Use the JCR data control to access documents stored in a content repository
• Build and manage customizable and personalizable application pages
• Consume standard-based portlets in a WebCenter application
• Describe the main functionality of WebCenter Spaces

LVC is a fairly new training format for Oracle University, here is a brief overview of it:

Oracle University’s Live Virtual Class is comparable to our traditional in – class training without the need for expensive travel. With the latest in collaborative technology, top instructors, cutting-edge curriculum, and hands-on labs, we offer an exciting combination of traditional content and interactive learning.
	Same expert instructors as our classroom training Same content – enhanced for online delivery Save time and money by avoiding expensive travel Efficient training for coworkers across multiple locations Classes available both day and night Train at home, office, or anywhere you have an Internet connection Lab access for full duration of class 100% Student Satisfaction Program

WebCenter Community on LinkedIn

If you’re interested in WebCenter, chances are you’re into social networks . There’s a pretty active group of people on LinkedIn, discussing WebCenter-related issues, questions. The group has 40+ members and counting… Participants include customers, partners, as well as members of the WebCenter product team. Worth checking it out…

Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook Available

The WebCenter 11g Handbook: Build Rich, Customizable Enterprise 2.0 Applications is now available in online stores and possibly in your nearest book store too.

If you are evaluating the WebCenter Framework, Social Computing Services, or are simply curious what WebCenter is all about – flipping through the book is a pretty time and cost effective way of getting the big picture. If you are using WebCenter, there are a lot of samples that walk you through the capabilities.

Here is some extra information that may help you decide if this is the right book for you. The high level table of contents is at the bottom of the post, and here is the detailed TOC. This is a podcast (mp3), published by McGraw Hill about the book. And here is a sample chapter from a snap shot taken shortly before the book went to print, so it’s very close to the actual one in the book: Chapter 11 – Runtime Customization.

Table of contents

Part I: Introduction to Oracle WebCenter and the Application Development Framework
Chapter 1. Business Application Development: The Journey to WebCenter
Chapter 2. The WebCenter Development Environment
Chapter 3. Oracle Application Development Framework
Part II: Building WebCenter Applications
Chapter 4. Building Your First WebCenter Page
Chapter 5. Consuming and Building Portlets
Chapter 6. Inter-component Communication
Chapter 7. Integrating Content Systems
Chapter 8. Overview of WebCenter Web 2.0 Services
Chapter 9. Social Web 2.0 Services–New Concepts in the Application Landscape
Chapter 10. Setting Up Your Development Environment for Success
Part III: Tailoring Your Applications
Chapter 11. Run-Time Customization
Chapter 12. Resource Catalog
Chapter 13. Skinning Your WebCenter Applications
Chapter 14. Metadata Services Framework
Chapter 15. Extending Oracle Composer
Chapter 16. MDS Under the Hood of WebCenter
Part IV: Administering Your Applications
Chapter 17. Installing and Managing WebCenter
Chapter 18. Security
Chapter 19. Deployment
Part V: Oracle Applications Integration
Chapter 20. Extending Oracle Applications with WebCenter
Chapter 21. Looking to the Future with WebCenter and Fusion Applications