ATG Introduction:

Art Technology Group was an independent technology company specializing in eCommercesoftware. ATGs solutions provide marketing, On content personalization, merchandising, automated

recommendations.

ovem!er ", "#$# oracle announced that is has agreed to ac%uire Art

Technology Group. ATGs solutions ena!le enterprises to provide a cohesive online customer e&perience. Oracle and ATG are helping to grow !usiness revenue and to improve !rand value, to achieve !etter operating results, and increase !usiness agility across online and traditional commerce environments.

Understanding-ATG(The eCommerce Framework)

' ()C)*+), "##- . CO**) T/ 0O/T)( +12/A*
This article focuses on a !asic understanding on what ATG is,and what are the main components of ATG.The target audience is people who are new to this technology. ow a!out the framework.ATG is a 3ava !ased 4ramework used to develop the applications on 5e!.ATG framework mainly works on the !asis of three concepts (roplets, 4orm 6andlers and ,epository.7n this technology whatever we! applications that we are creating are developed as individual !ean components and they are linked using a properties file.0recisely ATG is a component centric development platform.There are certain terms a person dealing with the 45 will fre%uently come across,one such term is NUCLEUS, which is the core of ATG 4w. ucleus is actually a term which is conte&tual.7t can !e considered as a collection of server side 8ava !eans and servlets.9sed mainly for !ack end functionalites like handling 6TT0 re%uests,(! connectivity etc.7n a different way we can say it is the nucleus that organizes the 8ava !eans, and registers each of the !ean components with nucleus.:ey !enefits of ucleus includes, a hierarchical namespace;)ach component is arranged in a hierarchical structure, and every component has a uni%ue name./o it is easy to refer to components. ucleus components are pre-built so it is easy to !uild an application !y 8ust writing the properties file.,elationship with components and 8ava !eans can !e defined using name;value pairs in the properties files.

DSP tag libraries.These tags helps in rendering the content dynamically !y linking nucleus components directly to the 3/0s.)ach component in ATG is defined !y a PROPERTIES FILE.5hile creating a component, a properties file is automatically created in the path. This file helps the nucleus to know which component can !e used for which application.The properties file contains a listing of parameters2 Java class 2; A 8ava class to which the component is an instance of and lists the property values for initialization. File Sco e name 2;The o! Glo!al; /ession; t"e The The state state A 2;A complete com onent 2; of of separate the the !rief path There can is is components component components !e of are = shared separated availa!le a!out for for the the general among all each the individual component. scopes users. users. re%uest. component. ame;<alue pair for each !ean.7t is also called as a CONFIGURATION FILE which follows a key;value format. ormally the properties file contains the following

,e%uest; (escription

description

*a&imum file size 2; 7t indicates the ma&imum size of the file. DROPLETS 2; is a (ynamo /ervlet !ean used in ATG. The dsp2droplet tag is used to em!ed the contents of one 8sp into another html file. 7t also allows a user to refer a nucleus component rather than another 3/0 file.There are many droplets used in ATG those are called !uilt in or OUT OF T#E $O% components.7 would like to mention a few of

them so that when you start going through some official training this knowledge will give you an edge.4or;each droplet, component. /witch 7t is droplet an etc are tool a few used droplets for which form are OOT+. processing. FOR& #ANDLERS 2; A form handler descri!es how to link form elements in 3/0s with the properties of nucleus important comple& REPOSITOR' 2; A repository is a data access layer. The user or developer can access the data using the repository and repository item interface.There are a few models of repositories used in ATG.They are />? ,epository, />? profile repository, Composite ,epository, <ersioned ,epository etc.)la!orating on these at this stage will make things more complicated. 3ust try to keep these names in mind as of now.7 will try to come up with a !etter article on ATG, where readers will get a !etter understanding on each of the terms mentioned over here.