Commerce Enabled Portal integrates WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal by integrating the commerce capabilities in WebSphere Commerce as a portlet. This commerce portlet resides on the WebSphere Portal server, and communicates with WebSphere Commerce by sending requests to the WebSphere Commerce Server. WebSphere Commerce then executes the commands as it normally would, but instead of returning a complete HTML page, it returns fragments of the page to the portlet. The portal server then renders the fragments as part of the portal page. A portal page may be composed of several fragments.
Note: Although there is only one generic commerce portlet, there are several instances of it. The following diagram refers to WebSphere Commerce portlets. For more information, see Commerce Enabled Portal portlets.
The following diagram illustrates the high level architecture of the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Commerce integration.
Note:
Commerce Enabled Portal must be installed on two machines:
- One machine with WebSphere Portal.
- One machine with WebSphere Commerce.
All machines must be configured to participate in the same WebSphere Administrative domain. This way, all participating machines share the same single user registry. You must do this to ensure that single sign-on (SSO) and Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA) tokens work properly when deploying WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Commerce. For more information, see Single sign-on and Commerce Enabled Portal.
Run-time architecture
The following diagram illustrates in more detail the run-time architecture of a Commerce Enabled Portal.
- A user types the URL of the default portal page into a Web browser (either through a workstation, personal digital assistant or phone).
- The HTTP server forwards the request to the WebSphere Portal servlet engine, running on the WebSphere Application Server, as an HTTP request. If the request is from WAP, it will be routed through WebSphere Everyplace Suite - Everyplace Gateway to the WebSphere Portal servlet engine.
- Depending on the type of request, the portal servlet engine sends the request to one of its three supported aggregation modules:
- compact HTML (cHTML), which produces content for mobile devices that subscribe to the i-Mode wireless Internet service
- Wireless markup language (WML), which produces content for devices capable of displaying WML, such as mobile phones that are enabled for the wireless access protocol (WAP).
- HTML, which produces pages for desktop computers and other devices with HTML browsers.
- The portal servlet then renders the portal page within the browser, which may be composed of several portlets. This diagram illustrates a few of the instances of the commerce portlet provided with WebSphere Commerce that might display on a Commerce Enabled Portal page.
- The portlets send a request to WebSphere Commerce. Each instance of the commerce portlet points to a different URL in WebSphere Commerce. For example the Shopping Cart portlet would call the display shopping cart command.
Note: Although each instance of the commerce portlet exists in its own session on WebSphere Portal, all instances of commerce portlets, which are parts of the same portlet application, use the same HTTP servlet session to the WebSphere Commerce request dispatching servlet. - Once the WebSphere Commerce HTTP request servlet receives the request, the request follows the same flow as it does in non-portal WebSphere Commerce operations.
- Fragments of the HTML page (or applicable format) are returned to the portlet. The portal server then renders the fragments as part of the portal page that is displayed in the user's browser.