WebSphere Portlet Factory

Dynamic Profiling

Many companies want to create applications that are highly customized for their partners, customers, and employees. At the same time, these companies also want to lower their already high application maintenance costs. Unfortunately, with traditional tools and technologies, it is very difficult for companies to achieve both high levels of customization along with lower maintenance costs.

IBM WebSphere® Portlet Factory is architected to solve both of these requirements for customization and lower maintenance costs with a unique capability called Dynamic Profiling. This capability helps developers quickly and easily create multiple, highly customized applications from one code base, all without requiring additional code changes, redeployment of files, or publishing of HTML and JSP. A WebSphere Portlet Factory developer simply needs to apply different profile values to the Builders to generate multiple applications with varying presentation, business logic, data sources, and workflows.

Thus, with profiling, companies can create an unlimited number of adaptive, role-driven applications that change on demand. Without profiling, companies need to maintain multiple versions of their portlet applications or write conditional logic to achieve the same effect.

Examples

WebSphere Portlet Factory's Dynamic Profiling allows companies to:

• Build adaptive portlets that can change depending on the characteristics or role of the user, without the need for conditional coding and without having to maintain multiple versions of the code.
  
  Example 1: An HR self-service portlet can display vacation time for an individual employee when the employee logs in. If a manager were to log in, the same portlet could display the vacation time for all employees within the department.
  
  Example 2: When a sales rep from California logs into his sales dashboard, he sees only the data for his region and his assigned product. When a sales executive from Germany logs into this same exact dashboard, she sees a rollup of all the reps that report to her, for all the products she owns, and in her native language.
  
  For each of these examples, there is only one code base for the portlets and the application. All tailored variations are created dynamically via profiling.
• Reuse code bases by creating different variations of the same application.
  
  Example: By simply profiling the back-end data source, a portlet that displays CRM info from SAP® can be reused to display data from Siebel.

Dynamic Profiling enables companies to quickly create many variations of an application or portlet from one underlying model, without having to copy and paste code or write conditional logic.