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IBM Web Experience Factory Designer is a tool for developing Java 2 platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) web applications, and portlets. You can install it as a plug-in to Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs).
With the IBM Web Experience Factory Designer, you create projects, under which you develop models using builders, and then generate the resulting web applications and portlets from those models. The IBM WebSphere Portal server framework provides multiple services, for example, page navigation and collaboration features. Each builder has a wizard user interface through which you specify input. The builder automatically generates or modifies part of the application.
This topic discusses the integration of custom web applications or portlets with IBM Connections using the REST Service Call builder. The sample application that we describe is developed using Eclipse 3.2, Web Experience Factory 7.0.1. It also requires access to an IBM Connections 3.0.1 server, and optionally, an IBM WebSphere Portal Server v7.0. For more information about the APIs available in IBM Connections, refer to the
IBM Connections Application Programming Interfaces documentation. This wiki also has a section focused on the API
9.0 Using the API.
The sample application
The sample application involves an Office Supplies store. Dan Misawa, who is the Office Supplies store clerk is responsible for blogging about their products every month. He posts the featured product of the month on his IBM Connections-based blog site. To save time, Dan makes a request to the development team to allow him to post basic information directly from the product catalog into a newly created blog entry. That way, he can simply add more content to his blog entry without having to ensure that he entered the correct information about the product.
The following figure shows the welcome page of the application. The welcome page provides a list of the products in the catalog and give users the ability to click one of the items to view the details.
By clicking the link from the product summary view, users can view the products details as shown in the following figure. From the product detail page, Dan can choose to post the selected product as the featured product of the month into his blog.
After clicking
Post to My Blog , Dan can now see his newly created blog entry in his blog as displayed in the following figure. Here, the automation enters the important information about the product, as well as the product image. Such automation saves Dan from having to look up the information from the catalog manually and typing or pasting it into the blog entry. It also minimizes typing errors.
Next steps
The following sections provide additional details about the application:
10.1 Office supplies IBM Web Experience Factory project
10.2 Office Supplies service provider
10.3 Blogs service provider
10.4 Office Supplies application
10.5 Deploying to the Portal Server
10.6 The Office Supplies application sample code