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.

Installing the WebCenter Development Environment

In this quick demonstration I show the steps of setting up the WebCenter development environment:

1. Installing Oracle JDeveloper Studio Edition 11gR1 (11.1.1.0.0)
2. Installing the WebCenter Extension for Oracle JDeveloper using Help > Check for Updates
3. Confirming that the installation succeeded

While setting up the development environment is very quick and easy, there are still a lot of things that you as a developer can try out without any additional installation.

• Build and consume portlets: The Integrated WebLogic Server that ships with JDeveloper contains a portlet container and sample portlets that you can deploy your portlets to.

• Build customizable applications with Oracle Composer: The customization data is saved by  Metadata Services (MDS). In a development environment we use the file system repository, by default.
• Integrate content: In a development environment, very often we use the file system adapter to test content integration using Java Content Repository (JCR – aka: JSR 170), or the Document Library task flows.
• Add Tagging and Linking: If you have an Oracle XE database, you can install the WebCenter database schema and incorporate tagging and linking as well.
• Integrate Email: If your company has an IMAP4 or a MS Exchange server, you can surface your email by connecting to your server using the Email connection and task flow.

An excellent summary of the capabilities can be found in the Fusion Middleware Tutorial for WebCenter Developers (HTML | PDF | Supporting Files).

Packed WebCenter Hands-On Session

Quick update: the first WebCenter Hands-On session that I mentioned earlier this week was full today. We have 2 more sessions on Tuesday, if you missed it on Sunday.

Tuesday, September 23, 11:30am-12:30pm, Marriott, Golden Gate C1
Tuesday, September 23, 5:30pm-6:30pm, Marriott, Golden Gate C1

Hope to see you there!