Developer tools | HCL Digital Experience

Learn more about the developer tools and features of HCL Portal, including HCL Web Experience Factory Designer and IBM Rational Application Developer for HCL Digital Experience Software.

Web Experience Factory

Portal site developers who are working with web applications and portlets can benefit from enhanced web Experience Factory features, including:
  • Builders and profile sets to develop models and generate the resulting web applications from those models, thus making the developing process easier and faster.
  • A wizard user interface (provided with each builder) through which you specify input. The builder then automatically generates or modifies part of the application.
  • Iterative development via builders to implement design patterns.
  • Profiles sets, which let you generate multiple versions of one application, making it easier to develop multiple versions of one application for different human languages or different user groups, for example, a different version for different human languages or different user groups.

Rational® Application Developer

Portal site developers can increase productivity and efficiency by using Rational® Application Developer for easier development, testing, analysis, and delivery of portlet applications. The following integrated capabilities are included in the Portal Toolkit:
  • Simplified client-side scripting of HTML pages with added support for jQuery JavaScript™ library, including content assist, autocomplete, views, palette drag-and-drop, wizards, editors, and automated code generation.
  • Automated and simplified build process by using the Maven framework, which uses standards in a common, flexible system that developers can learn once and deploy across multiple projects. The Maven framework provides uniformity to a project's build infrastructure, thus promoting quality and productivity by helping developers apply build best practices.
  • Portlet project support for the Standard Portlet API.
  • Web perspective views and editors for developing portlets, as well as visual tooling to insert portlet programming objects into JSP files by using Page Designer.
  • Comprehensive multi-channel application development by using features like Rich Page Editor, Mobile Browser Simulator and mobile friendly JavaScript™ frameworks and libraries.
  • Full fledged development and integration options for JEE artifacts and frameworks such as JSF, EJB, REST, and Web Services.

APIs

HCL Portal portlet APIs provide standard interfaces for the following functions:
  • Accessing remote content.
  • Looking up credentials.
  • Storing persistent data.
  • Communicating with other portlets.
HCL Portal supports two different portlet APIs by providing two portlet containers:
  • The Java™ Portlet Specification API
  • The Standard Portlet API
    Note: The IBM® Portlet API has been deprecated for WebSphere® Portal Version 7.0 and later versions.
You can enhance and extend the tagging and rating features of the portal by using service APIs. The following service APIs are available with WebSphere® Portal:
  • The Java™ API
  • The REST API

You can use Personalization APIs to allow Rational® Application Developer and the Personalization runtime environment access to user and content data in customer data stores.