Using Spring Portlet MVC 3.0 in Oracle Webcenter Portal (Spaces)

You may find yourself in the same quandary as me.  I want to stand up a portal quickly at an Oracle shop(client), so Webcenter Portal is currently the defacto choice as the solution, and in this case Spaces has been chosen for its ease of setup and collaboration (including built-in integration with BPM).  However, the client is not an ADF development shop, but is familiar with another web development framework like Spring MVC. Since the only way to expose portlets in Webcenter Portal 11g is using WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets), it shouldn't really matter what framework you use to develop the portlet as long as it is deployed using WSRP you can register it with Webcenter Portal and use it as you desire.  Note that there are plenty of more informed blogs and websites that provide the argument whether to use Webcenter Portal: Framework vs. Webcenter Portal: Spaces, as well as whether to extend your portal using either WSRP Portlets or ADF task flows.  I will defer to those sites on providing you those decisions to make, but if you have selected WSRP Portlets, here's how you can use your favorite IDE to develop them and deploy them properly to Webcenter Portal: Spaces.  Doing the same with Framework would entail similar steps, you would need to create a WSRP connection to the portlet producer from within JDeveloper and add the portlet to your page through JDeveloper instead of the Spaces web application. As a quick overview, I tried determining how to WSRP enable my portlet for some time before I stumbled onto the documentation within Oracle's 11g docs describing how this can be done via script as a pre-deployment step for any JSR-286 compliant portlet.  This instruction is within the administrator's guide and not the developer's guide, which made me realize their intention of separation of roles for deployment.  So I will document how to get a portlet into Webcenter Portal in several steps based on role to be consistent with this intention:

1. Developer creates JSR-168/286 compliant portlet using their IDE and whatever framework they want
2. Developer packages portlet up as EAR file for deployment
3. Deployer updates EAR file using provided script to expose JSR-286 portlet as WSRP Portlet Producer EAR, and adds weblogic.xml to embedded WAR to specify shared library to include (otherwise deployment FAILS)
4. Deployer deploys WSRP .ear to Webcenter Portlet Producers server.
5. Webcenter Portal: Spaces Administrator registers WSRP v2 portlet producer in Webcenter Portlet: Spaces using WSDL URL.
6. Webcenter Portal: Spaces page designer adds portlet to desired page and sets any default configurations.

Oracle Webcenter Portal 11.1.1.6 VirtualBox: Installing Webcenter Portlet Producers

Overview

In order to integrate some existing web site content/functionality into your Webcenter Portal, you'll likely need to have the provided Portlet Producers Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet installed in your Webcenter virtual machine.  These make integrating with existing sites much easier and quicker than a home-grown solution, but will need to be installed if you're using the Oracle VirtualBox VM that includes Webcenter Portal.

Prerequisites

First, you'll have to download the VirtualBox VM that runs Webcenter Portal from Oracle at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/learnmore/vmsoa-172279.html.

Second, you should have already installed it, and then started it up per the instructions at the site above.  In my case I have configured the "domain" wc_spaces, since I want to setup to use Webcenter Portal: Spaces locally.

Take a Backup/Snapshot of the VirtualBox Image

Of course nothing will go wrong, right?!?!  But just in case, make sure you at least snapshot your VM prior to following these steps.

Adding Webcenter Portal Portlet Producers

Since the virtual machine does not include the Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet out of the box, you'll need to install these and integrate the new WC_Portlet server installed into the VMConfig application Oracle ships with the virtual machine.