Introduction to the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit

The SAS Web Infrastructure Kit, which is provided with SAS Integration Technologies, serves as the underlying infrastructure for the following:

• SAS Portal Web Application Shell: a Web application that is included in the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and is used as a portal by other SAS Web applications

• SAS Information Delivery Portal: a separate SAS product that is installed with the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit in order to fully implement the capabilities of the SAS Portal Web Application Shell

Note: In this documentation, "portal Web application" is a generic term that refers to either of these portal entities. Even if you don't have the SAS Information Delivery Portal installed, the same general concepts apply to both.

The portal Web application provides a Web-based user interface that enables users to navigate and access a wide variety of information. This information includes reports, charts, Web applications, documents, and links to internal or external Web pages. You can configure security in order to ensure that users access only the information that they are authorized to see.

The portal Web application uses portlets to organize information on Web pages. Here is a sample portlet that contains links to Web sites that provide business or world news:

The portal Web application includes portlet templates and several predefined portlets that all conform to industry-standard design patterns. In addition, developers in your organization can use the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit to create custom portlets. The SAS Web Infrastructure Kit also includes a framework that enables users to launch SAS Stored Processes and have the results displayed dynamically in the browser. The kit also provides tools to facilitate secure integration and information sharing with remote applications.

Here is the documentation that is available for the portal Web application:

• The Web Infrastructure Kit Developer's Guide explains how to use the Web Infrastructure Kit to develop your own custom portlets and applications, or to customize and extend the features of the SAS Information Delivery Portal

• The SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide provides instructions for carrying out the administrative tasks that are required in order to fully implement the portal Web application for your organization.

• The Introduction to the SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0 provides a general introduction and tour of the SAS Information Delivery Portal. (Even if you don't have the SAS Information Delivery Portal installed, the same general concepts apply for the SAS Portal Web Application Shell that's included in the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit.)

• Online Help provides concepts and procedures that explain how to create pages in the portal Web application, add portlets to a page, add links and other items to portlets, search for items, view and navigate information maps and reports, and other tasks. To access the online Help, click the Help link in the portal Web application.

This overview contains the following sections:

• Components of the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and the SAS Information Delivery Portal

• Features of the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit

• Features of the SAS Information Delivery Portal

• Summary of Features

• Supported Languages for Localization

Components of the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and the SAS Information Delivery Portal

The SAS Web Infrastructure Kit includes the following components:

• a Web application shell that displays content in portlets and pages and that provides log-on and log-off capabilities, metadata searching, bookmarking, and content administration features

• a SAS Stored Process application that enables stored processes to run from the Web

• predefined portlets for content viewing and navigation

• a portlet development kit, which includes an API and a set of best practices, for developing custom portlets

• administrative tools for deploying services, portlets, and additional Web applications

• SAS Java components, Web infrastructure components, and a services infrastructure

If the SAS Information Delivery Portal is installed, then the following additional capabilities are provided:

• personalization features which enable users to create and customize their own pages and portlets

• the ability to subscribe to publication channels, and to publish content to channels or to WebDAV

• support for running SAS Stored Processes in the background and receiving alert messages when processes are finished

• support for syndicated, continuously updated Web content from information providers

• access to SAS information maps and SAS reports via the portal, if SAS Web Report Viewer and SAS Information Map Studio are installed

Both the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit and the SAS Information Delivery Portal are part of the SAS Intelligence Platform, which is the foundation for all of the SAS products in the business intelligence area. For a description of the SAS Intelligence Platform, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Overview.

Features of the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit

The SAS Web Infrastructure Kit provides the following features and capabilities:

• Developers can create custom portlets using a framework that conforms to industry-standard Model-Viewer-Controller (Model 2) design patterns. Portlet deployment is simplified through the use of portlet deployment descriptors and portlet archive (PAR) files. These features enable new portlets to be deployed without the need to restart the Web server. A set of action and initializer classes is provided to reduce the need for developing custom programs. Access to SAS custom tags and to tags in the Struts development framework simplifies the development and localization of JavaServer Page (JSP) pages.

  For information about developing custom portlets, see the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit: Developer's Guide. For information about deploying new custom portlets into your servlet container, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide .

• Developers can integrate other applications with the portal Web application shell. An application can be integrated in either of the following ways:

  • as a remote portlet, which is a portlet that calls a remote Web application. The Web application returns an HTML fragment to be displayed within the portlet's borders.

  • as a stand-alone application that is invoked from the portal Web application shell but is executed remotely and displayed in a separate browser window.

  The SAS Web Infrastructure Kit provides tools to facilitate secure information sharing between the portal Web application shell and the remote application. One type of information sharing is the single sign-on feature, which enables applications to be invoked from the portal without requiring the user to re-enter a user name and password. Other information related to a portal session can be shared as well.

  For information about deploying services for information sharing, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide. For information about developing applications that share services, see the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit: Developer's Guide.

• Users can launch SAS Stored Processes and have the results displayed dynamically in the browser. For information about how to register a stored process in the metadata repository in order to make it accessible to users, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide. For information about how to execute stored processes, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface.

• All viewing of content and launching of applications is subject to multilayered security features, which ensure that each user can access only the content that the user is authorized to access. For information about administering security, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.

• Developers or administrators can create custom themes that specify the text attributes, backgrounds, logos, and other graphical elements to be incorporated into the user interface. For information about creating themes, see the SAS Web Infrastructure Kit Developer's Guide.

• The search tool enables users to perform keyword searches to locate content that they are authorized to access. Users can view the located content items and bookmark them to see later. For more information about the search tool, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface.

• Users can generate e-mails that contain password-protected links to portal content, so that they can share information with other users in a secure environment. For more information about e-mailing, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface.

Features of the SAS Information Delivery Portal

In addition to the features listed previously, the SAS Information Delivery Portal provides the following features:

• Users can access the personalization options in order to update their personal views of the portal. By using these options, users can do these tasks:

  • create new portal pages, and edit or remove existing pages. Users who are authorized as content administrators can also share pages with groups of users.

  • choose the portlets that are to appear on each page, and arrange portlets in one, two, or three columns on a page.

  • create, edit, and remove collection portlets and URL display portlets. A collection portlet contains a list of content items; a URL display portlet accesses a specific URL, and then displays the returned information inside the portlet's borders.

  • create, edit, and remove WebDAV navigator portlets. If the Xythos WebFile Server (WFS) WebDAV server is installed, then these portlets enable users to access files of any type that are stored on a WebDAV server.

  • create links to intranet locations, external Web sites, or any other content that is accessible through a URL.

  • set user preferences, including country and language (locale), and theme.

  • move the portal's navigation bar to the top or side of the browser window, and change the order in which tabs appear on the navigation bar.

  For details about using these options, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface. For additional information about administering and securing content, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.

• If the Xythos WFS WebDAV server is installed, then users can choose to run SAS Stored Processes in the background and receive alert messages when processes are finished.

• Users can view content that has been published to SAS publication channels, manage their own subscriptions to publication channels, and publish content from the portal to a publication channel. If the Xythos WFS WebDAV server has been installed, then users can also publish portal content to a WebDAV repository and can view packages that have been published to WebDAV.

  For information about using these features, click the Help button in the banner of the user interface. For information about setting up publication channels for use in the portal, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.

• Syndicated, continuously updated Web content from information providers can be provided to users through the portal. The portal Web application provides support for the RSS (Rich Site Summary) standard, a lightweight XML format that is designed for sharing news headlines and other syndicated Web content.

  For information about setting up access to syndicated channels, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.

• If your organization has installed SAS Web Report Viewer and SAS Information Map Studio, then users can access SAS information maps and SAS reports using the portal.

  For information about using the report and information map features, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface. For information about administering these features, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.

Summary of Features

Based on the software that your organization has installed, you can use the following table to determine the availability of features:

Supported Languages for Localization

Here is a summary of the supported languages and the components that have been localized: