Oracle announced the Oracle Portlet Factory development tool designed to help organizations integrate and interact with data pulled from disparate business applications via a portal. The technology enables customers to build composite applications that interact with data from SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and Oracle e-business suite applications.

Built using technology licensed from Bowstreet, Oracle Portal and Oracle Portlet Factory are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, and will enable companies to use disparate existing applications to build business processes, according to Oracle. For example, Oracle Portlet Factory includes an integrated portlet development environment and an SAP adapter, which simplifies the process of building portlets for SAP applications. Developers can use the adapter to easily drag and drop SAP functional components into portlets that can be accessed through an organization's internal or external portal.

With Oracle Portal Factory, developers can also build portlets to JSR-168, the industry standard enabling interoperability between portlets and portals.

Oracle Portlet Factory will be generally available in 2006.