Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Kapow Robots

I am using Kapow to create 'web clipping robots'. It is kind of neat as Kapow lets you clip any page and then out of the box you can create IBM Portal 5 portlets. You can also create portlets for BEA portal 8.1. I was able to successfully create 3 IBM portlets. These were created as .war files and I was able to install them seamlessly in our test environment. We had RoboServer also running in the background and it looked like it was all set. However the portlet contents were empty. Troubleshooting revealed that Kapow also creates a .robot file for every web clipped content and they needed to be installed under the "{KAPOW_HOME}|projects" folder.

By the way linux version of Kapow provide "RoboServer" and "RoboServerService" as runtime component. Use RoboServer, I am not sure what RoboServerService is as it was not doing anything.

Friday, November 05, 2004

notes on ibm portal 5.02

I am currently working on IBM portal v5.02. At first glance this looks like way behind BEA portal 8.1 but looks to be very stable and deploying a new portlet is much easier (just export as a war file). Below are some of the notes that I found useful while reading on IBM portal.

Usually, many portlets are invoked in the course of handling a single request, each one appending its content to the overall page. Some portlets can be rendered in parallel, so that WebSphere Portal assembles all the markup fragments when all the portlets finish or time out. Portlets that are not considered thread-safe are rendered sequentially

WebSphere Portal provides discoverable services for its credential vault, for managing persistent TCP/IP connections, and for managing the WebSphere Portal content repository.

WebSphere Portal includes the Document Manager portlet application for contributing and sharing documents between users. Document Manager provides a simple method for storing, navigating, viewing, and searching documents and other content.

By defining the transcoding PortletFilter on a portlet, the portlet HTML output can be converted to WML or cHTML, depending on the device that is making the request

The WebSphere Portal page aggregation subsystem supports several markup languages and recognizes certain browsers and mobile device user agent signatures, all out of the box. The framework is easy to extend to support additional markups or new devices.

The default set of user profile attributes is based on the inetOrgPerson schema, which is supported by most LDAP directories. The user repository might consist of multiple data sources.

The mapping of user profile attributes to LDAP object classes is defined using in the file wms.xml.

The file attributeMap.xml specifies the details of how each attribute is mapped to the LDAP directory or database.

After determining the identity of the user, the portal server consults locally cached access control lists to determine which pages and portlets a user has permission to access.