One way for an enterprise to implement a service-oriented architecture is by building many software services that can be delivered via a shared Web portal.

Such an approach will not solve all issues surrounding SOAs, but it is a way to get to a "tactical" or quickly assembled services delivery mechanism, deferring some of the harder integration problems for later. Integration vendor Tibco Software Inc. unveiled PortalBuilder 5.0 Wednesday for producing services-oriented portals.

In September, Tibco debuted its Ajax-based General Interface Builder 3.0 for producing Web applications that allow more user interactions with the Web server than typical pages and forms-based HTML applications. Ajax combines simple Web technologies, such as XML and JavaScript, to allow users to download data and work with it or respond to a set of choices by dragging and dropping a listed response.

PortalBuilder 5.0 beefs up the server side of that interaction, and makes the portal an easier-to-manage host for multiple software services. As such, it can serve as the cornerstone for a tactical services-oriented architecture, says Aiaz Kazi, Tibco general manager for business integration.

The new PortalBuilder release minimizes custom coding by invoking standards-based underlying software to perform many functions. For example, PortalBuilder will handle connections to a database server that provides information needed by a service, or invoke a servlet engine that runs a set of Java commands to accomplish a business function through the portal.

PortalBuilder 5.0 also allows a new service to connect to Tibco middleware and, through it, legacy systems and packaged applications that may be needed to make the service work.

Such a portal approach deploys a services-oriented architecture without an enterprise service bus. An ESB would be needed with more advanced SOA approaches as a way to get applications to interact and function as a composite application, no matter where they resided on the network, says Kazi.

Tibco PortalBuilder 5.0 is priced at $200,000 per production server.