Using Coherence and BEA WebLogic Portal

 

 

Introduction

Coherence integrates closely with BEATM WebLogicTM Portal to provide WAN-capable clustered session management and caching for portal applications. Specifically, Coherence includes the following integration points:

  1. Coherence*Web support for WebLogic Portal
  2. P13N CacheProvider SPI implementation
  3. A blueprint for efficiently sharing data between WSRP-federated portals that leverages Coherence and the WebLogic Portal Custom Data Transfer mechanism

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Requires WebLogic Portal 8.1.6
Please note that these features require WebLogic Portal 8.1.6. Additionally for Coherence*Web to work correctly with WebLogic Portal, a patch for issue CR314006 must be applied to all WebLogic Portal installations that will be running Coherence*Web. You can request this patch from your BEA sales representative. After installing this patch, you must add the following system properties to all WebLogic Portal instances, including the admin server:

-Dcom.bea.p13n.servlet.wrapper=com.tangosol.coherence.servlet.api22.ServletWrapper 
-Dcom.bea.p13n.servlet.wrapper.param=coherence-servlet-class

Coherence*Web for WebLogic Portal

When Coherence*Web is installed into a WebLogic Portal web application, everything that the portal framework and portlets place into the HttpSession will be managed by Coherence. This has several benefits as described in the following article:
http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/05/session_management.html
Additionally, combining Coherence*Web and WebLogic Portal gives you extreme flexibility in your choice of a session management cache topology. For example, if you find that your Portal servers are bumping into the 4GB heap limit (on 32-bit JVMs) or are experiencing slow GC times, you can leverage a cache client/server topology to move all HttpSession state out of your Portal JVMs and into one or more dedicated Coherence cache servers, thus reducing your Portal JVM heap size and GC times. Also, you can leverage the Coherence Management Framework to closely monitor HttpSession-specific statistics to better tune your Coherence*Web and session management cache settings.
For details on installing Coherence*Web into a WebLogic Portal web application, please see Installing Coherence*Web Session Management Module.

P13N CacheProvider SPI Implementation

Internally, WebLogic Portal uses its own caching service to cache portal, personalization, and commerce data as described here:
http://e-docs.bea.com/wlp/docs81/javadoc/com/bea/p13n/cache/package-summary.html
WebLogic Portal 8.1.6 includes an SPI for the P13N caching service that can be implemented by third party cache vendors. Coherence includes a P13N CacheProvider SPI implementation that - when installed into a WebLogic Portal application - has the same benefits for serializable WebLogic Portal data as Coherence*Web has for HttpSession state, all without requiring code changes. Additionally, the Coherence CacheProvider allows your portlets to leverage Coherence caching services simply by using the standard P13N Cache API.
To install the Coherence P13N CacheProvider, simply copy the coherence-wlp.jar, coherence.jar and tangosol.jar libraries included in the lib directory of the Coherence installation to the APP-INF/lib directory of your WebLogic Portal application. On startup, WebLogic Portal will automatically discover the Coherence CacheProvider and transparently use it to cache data.
Please see the JavaDoc for the PortalCacheProvider class for details on configuring the Coherence CacheProvider and Coherence caches used by the provider. Additionally, please see the following document for a list of some of the caches used by WebLogic Portal:
http://e-docs.bea.com/wlp/docs81/perftune/apenB.html

Sharing Data Between WSRP-Federated Portals Using Coherence

The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) protocol was designed to support the federation of portals hosted by arbitrary portal servers and server clusters. Developers use WSRP to aggregate content and the user interface (UI) from various portlets hosted by other remote portals. By itself, though, WSRP does not address the challenge of implementing scalable, reliable, and high-performance federated portals that create, access, and manage the lifecycle of data shared by distributed portlets. Fortunately, BEA WebLogic Portal provides an extension to the WSRP specification that — when coupled with Oracle Coherence — allows WSRP Consumers and Producers to create, view, modify, and control concurrent access to shared, scoped data in a scalable, reliable, and highly performant manner.

 

See the following document for complete details:
http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/11/federated-portal-cache.html