OmniPortlet and Web Clipping Java Portlets Portlet Builder PLSQL Portlets

Portlet Technologies Matrix 2-17

2.8.3 Java Portlets and PLSQL Portlets

In Java portlets and PLSQL portlets, you have full control over your portlets user interface. Your portlet is free to generate any HTML content that conforms the rendering rules for Oracle Portal pages.

2.8.4 Portlet Builder

While you can be very productive in building portlets with Portlet Builder, it is somewhat limiting with respect to the user interface.

2.9 Ability to Capture Content from Web Sites

This section describes the portlet building tools in terms of their ability to include content from other sources.

2.9.1 Web Clipping

For portlets that display content from a remote Web site as it is presented at the source location, the best tool to use is Web Clipping. Web Clipping can tolerate the changes of the source HTML page to some extent. If a clipped table moves from one place to another in the source page, the Web Clipping engine can find the table again using the internal fuzzy match algorithm. Portlets built with Web Clipping can also maintain sessions to the remote Web sites. Web Clipping also supports end user personalization of HTML form values.

2.9.2 OmniPortlet

For portlets using the data but not the layout from a remote Web site, the best choice is OmniPortlet. Use OmniPortlet to retrieve the data, process the data format, filter, and so on, and present it in a portlet in a tabular, chart, or news format. OmniPortlet is a powerful tool that extracts data from Web pages by using its Web page data source.

2.9.3 Java Portlets

Java portlets can take advantage of the low-level Java networking APIs to retrieve and process content from remote Web sites. To avoid unnecessary development efforts, before choosing Java always make sure that Web Clipping or OmniPortlet are not viable options.

2.9.4 PLSQL Portlets

PLSQL portlets can communicate with Web servers to access data on the Internet by using procedures and functions from the UTL_HTTP package. The package makes HTTP callouts from SQL and PLSQL. The package also supports HTTP over the Secured Socket Layer protocol SSL, also known as HTTPS, directly or through an HTTP proxy. Other Internet-related data-access protocols such as the File Transfer Protocol FTP or the Gopher protocol are also supported using an HTTP proxy server that supports those protocols.

2.10 Ability to Render Content Inline

Active elements in your portlets, such as links or form buttons, enable your users to navigate to remote URLs. In a News portlet, for example, you can click a hyperlink to navigate to a news site with detailed information about news of interest. For example,