The Virtual Enterprise (VE) maintains a complete separation of the application logic from the interface logic. Interfaces can be either a client interface, where VE applications respond to a client actor, or resource interface, where VE applications utilize a resource actor. The later is further discussed in the Integration pages.
To provide external access to application logic, VE introduces the concept of a portal, where a portal maps one-to-one to a client actor on the system. A client actor can be a user in a given role, or another system altogether. Either way, a portal controls what functionality and information an actor can access from the entire set of application logic. It further provides the ability to customize the specific presentation by any particular device the actor might use. For example, a user accessing the system via a web browser would have a different look-and-feel than if he or she were using a PDA…possibly even different content. A client Web service that is playing the same role, would have yet another customization in WSDL.
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 The VE/Designer Portal Editor is used for defining and managing portals. An application might have one or more portals, depending on the different actors or user roles. For each portal, the Portal Editor organizes the available functionality as a hierarchical structure of navigations. The interpretation of navigation is device specific. For example, a navigation might show up as a shortcut or a tab on a web page, while it would be used to specify a WSDL Operation for a Web service.
In addition, a portal maintains device-specific templates at the portal level, and even down at a specific navigation level. As the name implies, templates are used to define an outline or guideline to follow while rendering objects to the target device format.
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 The VE/Designer Personalization Editor, however, is used to customize the rendering of a particular object or process. Personalization Editor provides WYSIWYG tools that are appropriate for each device. The web browser editor is an HTML based editor that renders objects into HTML pages. It is used to customize layout, color scheme, content, and even the dynamics of a web page. In addition, it supports the use of HTML templates developed by any 3rd-party tool (e.g. Macromedia Dreamweaver) to render a specific region of the page or the entire page.
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 Just like the web-browser editor, the PDA browser editor is a WYSIWYG HTML based editor. However, instead it emulates the rendering of an object onto a PDA page taking into account the appropriate form-factor. |
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 For Web services, the Web Service Editor provides the ability to customize the generated WSDL, and the SOAP messages accordingly. In a Web service template, one can specify the web service style (i.e. Document vs. RPC), and the target namespace. It is also used to control content and specify any tag name or data transformation for a particular object or attribute. |
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| VE provides a default rendering suitable for any object onto any supported device. Most of the time, personalization would be sufficient at the template level. However, the personalization editors discussed above can be used to achieve the desired look-and-feel or interface particulars, still, at a fraction of the time required by tradition visual editors. |
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