Webcenter Portal integration with ATG

Question

Are there any webcenter portal implementation where the ATG storefront features have been been exposed through the webcenter Portal. Are there any plugins or interfaces to enable the integration between portal & ATG.

Answer 1

Hi Sameer -
OOTB you can publish assets directly to disk using Export to XML, but you realize that by doing that, you're essentially using Sites as a very expensive GUI over a database.  By using a combination of Java classes and JSPs you can create very rich markup (or XML, or JSON, or whatever you like) and render that, then export that data to disk.  That way you can traverse asset relationships and write much more complex data to disk for consumption by external systems.
As for your options of #1 vs #2, you need to think carefully about what your goals are for using Sites and for using ATG.  There are a number of other integration options between Sites and ATG, including the reverse of #1, which is to have Sites render most pages and then consume data from ATG in service form.  There is also the efficient and decoupled approach of standing up ATG and Sites side-by-side and selectively integrating components together.  So Sites would drive marketing content and ATG would drive commerce content, and the two would leverage service APIs between the two when needed (for example, to render an ATG promo in Sites, or to render a detailed product description from Sites in ATG).
Each approach has pros and cons and there is no Correct Way To Integrate ATG and Sites, but there are, as you can see, several common patterns.
Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Tony Field
Function1