Creating an e-commerce web site is always a challenge, but it's even a bigger challenge if its a global website for a multinational firm in a heavily regulated industry. Thousands of products, hundreds of locales, different regulations, different prices, and different marketing collateral. Attend this session to see how we wired together E-Business Suite, WebLogic Portal, Universal Content Management, Identity Management, and Enterprise Search to meet the global business needs.

1. Creating a Global eCommerce Site
with EBusiness Suite and Fusion
Middleware
Brian “Bex” Huff
Chief Software Architect
Oracle ACE Director
Monday, October 17, 2011

2. The Project
 The Web Site Redesign (WSR) project
• Goal: completely re-vamp a 10-year old product website
 The company
• Multinational firm, heavily regulated industry
• Fortune 500 company
 The team
• Approximately 80 people
 My role
• WebCenter architect, designer, and developer
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3. High-Level Requirements
 Fast and easy contribution by business owners
• Mostly public content: secured edits
 Workflow process for all content changes
• Track who changed what, when, why
 Support for multiple regions/countries locales
 Applications and content on the same pages
• E-Commerce ordering tools
• End-user calculators and other small applications
 Global Search Engine Optimization: “Google Friendly” URLs
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4. The Challenges
 Different products available in different markets
• Users must never see a product they cannot purchase
 Different regulations per region
• You can’t say that in Germany!
 Taxonomy was surprisingly critical
• Incorrectly tagged content could lead to fines!
 What’s the best way to blend content and applications?
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5. More Challenges
 60+ product families
• Each has a “business owner”
 IE 6 must be supported
• Unfortunately...
 Different prices for different customers / locations
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6. The Stack!
 Mostly Oracle
 Infrastructure
• Linux, Oracle Database, GFS
 Framework
• WebLogic Portal, SPRING, AJAX, and JavaScript
 Back-End
• Enterprise Applications and middleware
 Security
• Several identity management applications
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7. Stack Diagram
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8. Infrastructure
 Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Why not?
 Oracle Database 11g
• What else?
 Red Hat Global File System (GFS)
• Needed a shared file system in the SAN
• Multiple nodes in the system had to share files
 Load Balancers
• Hardware and software (PEN)
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9. Framework
 WebLogic Application Server and Portal
• 3-node cluster for main web site, and admin interface
• 2-node cluster each for UCM, OID, IDOL, everything else!
 “WSR Admin” portal
• Configuration, customers, orders, product launches
 SPRING
• Open source toolkit for creating web front-ends in Java
 JavaScript libraries
• jQuery toolkit for front-facing
• ExtJS for Admin interface
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10. Back-End Applications: Existing
 E-Business Suite
• Contracts, customers, products for sale
 Product Information Management (QAD/FullTilt)
• Product specs: size, weight, etc.
• Categorization into product catalogs
• Localizable, but unfortunately not normalized
 Documentum
• Repository for technical manuals
• “Tactical” integration: content exported, but repository remains
• Full consolidation out of scope of current project!
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11. Back-End Applications: New
 WebCenter Content (UCM) 10gr3
• Main content repository
 Site Studio 10gr4
• Built on top of UCM
• Site navigation, web content, images, CSS, JS
• Has the “Open WCM” web services we need
 Autonomy Idol
• Enterprise Search
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12. Apps Challenges
 Speed was critical!
• Needed to make custom web services to query eBiz tables directly
 Multiple search indexes
• One per locale: critical the people only search in their locale!
 Blending the data together
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13. Security
 Active Directory
• Used for internal employees
• Integration needed for UCM and Admin site rights
 Oracle Internet Directory
• Used for external customers
• Needed to log in, make orders, view pages
 Oracle Access Manager
• Single-Sign-On
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14. Security Configuration
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15. Integration Strategy
 Portal front-end blends everything together
 Content stored and managed by WebCenter Content
• Marketing literature for products
• General web pages, contact us, literature downloads, video
• Localized versions of web assets
 Site navigation controlled by Site Studio
• Opt-in, Opt-out
 Product information controlled by QAD
• Localized and normalized there
• Export the raw data to the portal’s database
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16. Integrations
 Portal - EBuisness Suite
• Some TIBCO Web Services, some custom Web Services
• Create Order, Order Details, Item Price services
• Consumed via AJAX from portlet
 Portal - Product Info / QAD
• PIM data not fully normalized
• Get a “dump” of raw data nightly
• Organize it in WSR database in more useful ways
• Create a “view” on this table, to drive UCM metadata tags
• Tree-control to “tag” a page as belonging to a product catalog
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17. Integrations, cont.
 Portal - UCM
• Used “Open WCM” Web Services and a custom servlet
• Did not use Site Studio for External Applications (SSXA)
• Needed localization features unavailable in SSXA
• Used RIDC bean
• Cached with EHCache
• Taxonomy controlled by UCM
 Portal - Database
• Spring DOA, and hand-written SQL
• Tried Hibernate, ditched it half way through
• ORM frameworks look good on paper... but...
• Only worth the effort if using a 2nd layer cache, which we weren’t
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18. Search Engine
 IDOL needed one repository per locale
• Also needed STRICT adherence to taxonomy
 Did not have a UCM connector
• HTTP web spider would not be fast enough for multiple locales
 Custom connector
• Database view on Revisions and DocMeta table
• Scheduled task to watch for new content
• Determined the URL based on xWebSiteSection
• Determined taxonomy/locale from other metadata
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19. “Admin” Portal
 Custom interface to E Business suite and OID
• Create users, manage email templates
• Enable products to be for sale online in specific regions
• Manage / edit orders
• Create a new “region” to enable sales / new website
• Create new training class schedule / locations
• Customer email subscriptions
• Custom reports
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20. Custom Portal Controller
 Import the “Site Studio Navigation” file from UCM/Site Studio
• Contains the full navigation for the site
• All content references, and “tokens” representing specific AJAX apps
 Generate site navigation for each locale
• Inherit navigation/content from the “global” locale
• Opt in / opt out of specific pages
 Inject AJAX applications when “Tokens” found on page
• Users can select which AJAX app they want
• Data files “tagged” with a product ID or catalog
• Auto-generated AJAX
• Some templates
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21. Custom Navigation Editor App
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22. Security Integration
 Most was out-of-the-box
• OAM / OID works well with WebLogic and UCM
• Some issues with OAM and non-signed applets
 Some customizations needed
• Simplified “customer info” editor in the Admin portal
 Custom AJAX controller
• Security through AJAX is tricky
• Sessions expire while still on the page
• AJAX needs to handle session expiration, and redirect
• Made custom OAM AccessGate
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23. Data Cache
 Use the distributed EHCache code
 Extremely easy to make existing SPRING code cachable
@Cacheable(cacheName="ucmCache")
public String renderPlaceholderByDocName(IdcContext userContext,
! String docName, String placeholderDefinitionName, String siteId,
! String nodeId, boolean isContrib, String userLocale) {
...
}
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24. Web Cache
 Use front-end Apache server with mod_proxy
 Problem: entire web site is HTTPS
• Browsers by default do not cache secure traffic
• Problem: with all the JavaScript libraries, some pages were 1 MB!
• Caching those static resources critical
 Apache server tuning
• For all cachable content, set Cache-Control: public
• Do not cache content from AJAX controller
• Force AJAX to reload on every page to avoid stale content
• mod_deflate
• GZIP-compress rarely changing text files (JS/CSS/XML)
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25. Technical Architecture
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26. Product Catalog
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27. AJAX Embedded Application
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28. Business-Controlled Content
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29. Lessons Learned
 Hire a team that’s done it before
• Primary reason behind previous “false starts”
 Avoid GFS like the plague!
• Extremely difficult to set up properly
• A file locking snafu would seize up all nodes in the system until rebooted!
 More frequent code reviews, and project patterns
• Could have avoided some
• Tough to do, when the team’s under a tight deadline
 OAM/WebGate has issues with non-signed Applets
• UCM side was tricky to get working with SSO
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30. If I Had To Do It All Over Again...
 Straight WebLogic for front-end, no Portal
• Admin interface used portlet features, but
• Front-end web site was all in one SPRING portlet
• Google-Friendly URLs would be easier
• AJAX controller would be easier
• Oracle really needs a lightweight Java framework for websites...
 Use Diesel Point for search engine
• IDOL was overkill, both in cost and features used
 Focus on ONE JavaScript framework, and keep it lean
• Because of the “plugin” architecture, jQuery grows like weeds
• Pages can become HUGE relatively quickly
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31. Questions?
 My Company: http://bezzotech.com
 My Blog: http://bexhuff.com
 My Self: bex@bezzotech.com
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