Problem:
One of the Bintegra’s key expertise is offering digital experience platforms. Thus for our dear customer Agencija za Energijo we made custom made data portal developed with Java Spring, Liferay and Apache service mix.
Agencija za Energijo is the national regulatory authority of the Republic of Slovenia and as such it directs and supervises electricity and gas energy operators and carries out tasks regulating energy operators’ activities in the field of heating and other energy gases. One of its main tasks is to gather and share data from the energy sector in Slovenia in order to regulate the energy market and ensures the transparency and openness of the regulatory process.
For this purpose the challenge was to plan and implement user friendly enterprise solution where the employees can publish the data that has to be public and the public can access that data on a open source portal.
Solution:
For this purpose, we proposed the following portal architecture as shown in the figure below :
Portal URL: https://www.agen-rs.si/web/emonitor/
The front end of the architecture is the Liferay portal, which is business software for creating and managing digital experiences and ensuring a consistent presence of the brand throughout several channels, which translates into immediate results and long-term value. The advantages of the Liferay Portal is that is open source software based on the Java platform and is compatible with all the major operating systems, application servers and databases. Liferay Portal is actually several web pages adapted to different applications and users. Employees in the Energy Agency who are logged into the portal, based on their role in the company, can have, or can not have access to certain portals and service pages. In addition, administrators and other participating users can manage Liferay’s own Content management system. On the other hand, end users of the portal only access the public page (see link here), where they can see the published content, indicators and reports for the Slovenian energy market.
The frontend and backend of the solution are connected via http calls and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) responses. In our case, when an end user opens an energy market report, they send http calls to the backend system and obtain a response in JSON format, which is then displayed as a graph on the frontend page of the portal.
JSON data is derived from the REST APIs that belong to the backend of the architecture. REST (Representational State Transfer) defines a set of architectural principles by which we can expose online services with a unique URL address. To access and modify resources, we used REST methods: Post, Put, Get, and Delete. At the heart of the backend architecture, is a Java and Apache ServiceMix application, which core functionality is to access the data from the database, to save it to a physical location on a designated disk as a JSON file, and to expose REST API service. We used Apache ServiceMix as a web services container, a service-oriented architecture component, and a component for connecting to the legacy systems. For developing the backend architecture, from the Apache ServiceMix services we used Apache Camel REST services.
Benefits:
The use of Liferay as a leading platform for portal solutions was crucial in building friendly UX solutions and achieving effective UX on the front and back of the system. Regardless of whether it’s the frontend or the backend of the application, an intuitive interface that is easy to use meant a shorter curve for the end-users of the solution, and reduced the learning time of the platform. As part of further developing projects, we will continue to use the Liferay platform, and develop simple and intuitive digital experience platforms.
