Justin Lokitz On Building Open-Standard Portlets for Location Information
February 14th, 2005 by Mark Rittman
Building Open-Standard Portlets for Location Information : "In business,
information is king. With the advent of enterprise portals, getting pertinent
information has become as easy as logging onto a single Web site and using a
single password. The enterprise portal has moved beyond the custom-built
executive dashboard to become an indispensable backdrop through which all end
users (employees, citizens, and customers alike) can glean the information they
need at a moment’s notice without needing to install special software (other
than a standard browser), use a particular operating system and/or device, or
open more than one window. The same can be said for location information. In a
previous article ("Using Location Information in Enterprise Reporting"), I
stated that "location information is everywhere; it can be found across all
lines of business, all industries, and in virtually every organization and
department in the world." With the release of that article and the push for
location-based intelligence in such venues as the 2005 Location Technology &
Business Intelligence Conference, it has never been more evident that finding
patterns in location data, as it exists in tandem with relational data, is
increasingly important, if not imperative. Today, executives, analysts, and
citizens all need to see information as it pertains to location attributes, and
they want this information at their fingertips … In this article, I’ll discuss
how to develop portlets, using open standards such as WSRP and JSR 168, that
incorporate location information and applications such as geographical maps. All
of the portlet code this article describes can be registered in any vendor’s
portal solution that supports the portlet standards WSRP and JSR 168."
Another excellent OTN article by
Justin Lokitz on using the spatial data and mapping features of Oracle 10g
and Oracle AS 10g. You might remember Justin’s previous article on
Spatial/Locator and Oracle Discoverer ("Using
Location Information in Enterprise Reporting") and a similar article of mine
("GIS-Enabling Your Oracle Data
Warehouse") that Justin contributed
some examples to. This article looks at building portlets that comply to the new
JSR 168 standard – and are therefore deployable to any compliant portal product
- that use the built-in spatial (pay-extra) and locator (free) features of 10g
together with Oracle Map Viewer, part of Oracle AS10g.
There’s also mention of the JDeveloper Portal add-in
that makes developing JSR 168-compliant portlets fairly straightforward, and a
brief look at the Mapviewer JSP tag library that’s used to display the map
within the portlet. An interesting and useful article by Justin, and one to
bookmark and take a look at when you’ve got a spare twenty minutes.
