Basic concepts about ATG.

This post is for the ATG beginners to get some basic overview about ATG.

At the framework level, ATG is a java based application platform for hosting web-based applications, as well as RMI accessible business components, with an ORM layer, a component container, an MVC framework, and a set of tag libraries for JSP.




ATG mainly works on the basis of following concepts:

       Nucleus - (Nucleus: Conhecendo a ferramenta. / Nucleus: Inside the tool.)
       Droplets - (Quick Tutorial to How to Create a Custom Droplet // ATG Droplet List)
       DSP Tag Libraries - (DSP Tag Libraries)
       Form Handlers - (FormHandlers ATG)
       Repository - (RQL - Repository Query Language)

1. Nucleus:  Nucleus is server side java beans. To use ATG platform functionality, a web application needs to start Nucleus by invoking atg.nucleus.servlet.NucleusServlet. It’s essentially an object container that manages the lifecycle of POJOs using reflection and dependency injection.

2. Droplet: Droplet is a Servlet and is also a Java bean. Advantage of droplet is that you can have multiple Droplets in a single page. Droplets can be nested and can pass parameters to each other.

3. DSP Tag Libraries: Dynamo Server Pages is a set of tags that ATG provides, that allow us to access the functionality provided by the Dynamo Application Framework such as accessing Nucleus componenets, passing parameters,...

4. Form Handler: ATG Form Handlers are components for validating and processing html forms, calling business components and managing flow between a limited set of pages (e.g. success/error), so a bit like Struts Action classes in that they mediate between the view and model. ATG provides hundreds of readymade form handlers for performing all sorts of tasks, like updating a customer profile, managing your shopping cart, checking out, or interacting with a repository.

5. Repository: A repository is a data access layer, which gives a generic representation for a data store.


Following are the main administration UIs provided by ATG

Oracle ATG Web Commerce (Oracle Commerce Platform): This application deals with the basic customer-facing back-end functionality. Basic eCommerce capabilities like cart, profile etc. are included in this application. This feature is mandatory to install.

Oracle ATG Business Control Center (BCC): This application provides a wide-range of capability to the business users to manage content and catalog on the site.

Oracle ATG Control Center (ACC): This is a developer's tool which provides a UI-based interface to edit some cool ATG features like Workflows, Pipelines etc.

Oracle ATG Customer Service Center (CSC): This application provides capability for customer executives to view and solve customer problems. This application mostly involves order and profile management. A customer executive should have access to this application for viewing (and in some case editing) order/profile details. For example, a customer complains that his/her order has not been delivered. He calls-up the call center, where a customer executive asks for the order-id. The executive can search for the order in the CSC application, and fetch the order details, and communicate the delivery status. It provides a wide variety of other powerful features focusing on customer care.

Oracle ATG Commerce Reference Store (CRS): This is a sample reference application, which uses ATG out-of-the-box functionality and API, with some customization. Code for this application can also be found on oracle website. There is a lot of implementation which can be used as a reference for actual implementation on ATG.


References:

Basic concepts of ATG
Oracle ATG Applications