Sun Web Space training (day 5)
Friday, 3 july 2009, Brussels / Belgium.
Secure Web Access (SWA)
In a usual situation we have the Gateway, what is a separate application running parallel besides the portal server, which does URL rewriting and supports Netlets, Netfiles and Proxylets. But now we don’t need a separate instance for the Gateway. The Web Space engineering team rethought the system by making Secure Web Access. A separate web application, what you can deploy on any application server, which only support URL rewriting. The original idea was deploying SWA on Web Space, but there are still things to reconsider like the place of SWA inside the architecture of a secure web environment. Maybe position it inside a WebDAV server. SWA still needs to be released. It’s expected around july 2009 (this month). It’s still not clear if it will be open source or a supported product add-on.
WebSpace Search Integration
The WebSpace search engine for a portal user is not based on web crawling but it is based on static indexing. That’s why WebSpace uses Apache Lucene as core implementation. WebSpace calls Lucine when a document or content is added to the portal. It is also possible to index content inside own developed portlets. There is some configuration and an API for doing indexing. (http://lucene.apache.org and http://www.opensearch.org for more information)
Import/Export
WebSpace is able to export the whole presentation layer of the portlet, including the communities, pages, portlet definitions, user preferences, and so on, in one zip file. Portlets themselves need to be deployed by yourself.
OpenSSO Plugin
WebSpace supports integration with OpenSSO. The OpenSSO part needs to be deployed as a WAR file on the WebSpace Glassfish container. After that configurate OpenSSO. Installing the plugin is an Ant build procedure. It is important that you have a good overview on the directory structure of the WebSpace environment. OpenSSO can be integrated with Identity Manager / LDAP / AD for doing real enterprise user management. Unfortunately this part is not fully supported by the WebSpace framework. But it does allow to be pluggable with various Enterprise components like LDAP and AD. To still give an idea, you can create some users inside the realm of OpenSSO. Edit each user and give them an email address, because this is required for WebSpace.
After restarting WebSpace, the security mechanism of the portal is hooked to OpenSSO. You are redirected to the OpenSSO login page, and after authorisation redirected to the portal homepage.
Expectations
I see a very fun product to work with. Considering what we’ve done in one week is a lot though. But still with the big picture in mind. I’m thinking about planning a good use case (1 or 2) to give a good impression to the outside world what the capabilities are of WebSpace. The main goal is to introduce it to the enterprise. The Australian government did an implementation in WebSpace, and it seems the first phase is a successful one. So the Public Sector is already a good branch to work on. Also the health care, university / high school and telecommunication market could be good candidates to implement WebSpace.