WebSphere Commerce Portal development environment

Web developer

Uses a dedicated workspace for WebSphere Portal development. This workspace only includes MVCPortlet and other WebSphere Portal related projects. WebSphere Commerce server is running on another machine to provide the required backend business services support while testing with the MVCPortlet application. The advantages of this setup include less overall memory consumption and isolation of the two separate development roles: web developer and component developer.

Component developer

Focuses only on backend WebSphere Commerce component services, and can use WebSphere Commerce Developer to perform tasks.

Team leader

Oversees the entire project integration and requires access to both the frontend interface and backend component services. This role requires both the MVCPortlet and the WebSphere Commerce Developer on the same workbench. This is the most complicated setup and has a higher memory consumption requirement since both WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal servers can run at the same time.

Creating a portlet project

Rational Application Developer includes tools designed to help develop portlet applications for WebSphere Portal.

For more information, see Portlet development overview.

Customizing portlets to display WebSphere Commerce content

• Adding or customizing a portlet using MVCPortlet
• Retrieving data from WebSphere Commerce service modules using the GetData tag
• Creating a portlet render in MVCPortlet
• Developing cooperative portlets
• Creating custom portlet event handlers in MVCPortlet

Testing, debugging, or profiling a portlet

Similar to testing a portal project, the Rational Application Developer workbench can also be used for testing or debugging a portlet project. This task involves running the portlet project against either locally on a test environment within the workbench, or attach remotely to a separate server.

Portal tools provide an additional type of server configuration called the portal server configuration, which contains the server configuration information needed to publish the portlet application on a WebSphere Portal machine. After it is published, the target portlet appears on a preview page in the WebSphere Portal server. Source-level debugging is also supported. For more information, see Testing and debugging portlets.

Publishing a portlet

A portlet project can either be deployed to a WebSphere Portal server automatically or manually. For more information, see Publishing portlets.