I am working with Coldfusion 9, running under jBoss/Liferay 6.
All is well, I have developed quite a few portlets that I have made work around for (when I run into some issues that I could usually handle in a straight forward fashion). Overall Coldfusion 9 portlets work very well inside of Liferay.
One thing I really dislike is that the URLs are so unreadable, and I was really hoping for clean urls for my application, so when a user searches, and the result comes back, I can have them click a link like http://liferaysite.com/web/viewitem/ABC123.
Currently I get a raggedy URL that includes portlet status, properties, the portlet ID associated with the variable that I am passing (usually a combination of portlet id + variable) and other garbage that is un-needed.
Is there any 'easy' way to get clean URLs? My issue is that I am not a JAVA person, so I am not too confidant in digging into jBoss/Liferay code to get something done. However I feel that Liferay is sufficiently 'hands-free' so that I can build my portlets and deploy them without modifying JAVA code and getting dirty.
Any ideas? I am not able to find many articles on this, especially since Liferay 6 is so new, and there are so few people posting things about it. Maybe this would be some sort of URL rewriting in Jboss?
Thank you, appreciate any and all suggestions :)
The short answer is to use URL rewriting to achieve this and transform Liferay URLs to any form you want. There are 2 possibilities I see to do this:
Put an Apache web server in front of your Liferay server and use mod_rewrite
Use the URL rewriting filter that is already included in Liferay as this mimics what mod_rewrite does without the requirement of an extra Apache server
You might be interested in FriendlyUrlMappers. See this blog entry about the basics.
Regarding the "easy" you have to judge about that yourself. The nature of portals, e.g. combining completely different and independent applications (portlets) on a single page bring with it that you loose control over URLs (by default), because the portal has to disambiguate quite a lot of stuff. In order to get back control, you need to do some work, FriendlyUrlMappers impose some work, but the result is worth it IMHO.
Related
I have a web site project, a mixture of complex dynamic pages and authored CMS-managed content. I have the tools for the complex dynamic part and would like a CMS that allows me to call it to retrieve content that's been approved, i.e. for web site inclusion.
To be clear, I need the complex dynamic part to be the master and the CMS-managed content to be served up as and when I want it.
I had thought they'd be loads of options around this - it being an obvious (to me) thing to want to do. I'd also thought that CMS's would naturally publish API's (web service based ideally) to enable this...but my research so far doesn't seem to show this. Hopefully I'm just missing a trick. Can anyone help?
I've looked, btw, at openText, Alfresco, Jahia, Enfold, Percussion, Interwoven, EPIServer, Ektron to name a few.
Ideally, I'd like an open source CMS solution if there is one, definitely can't afford the big $ that some of the vendors are looking for.
Am I right in assuming you are wanting to use an API or Service to retrieve content from the CMS that has been through some approval process?
This is definately possible with EPiServer, through either the code API or, if more appropriate, a webservice, although I think the price might be an issue here.
I know this question sounds like utter madness, but hear me out for a second. We're a mixed language shop that has a lot of ASP.NET MVC 2 applications in production. We've no interest in rewriting those applications in another language. That said, we're also a huge IBM/Notes shop. We plan to make the move to Websphere Portal 7. Most of our Lotus Notes applications will obviously integrate pretty smoothly; however, we're wondering if we can surface our .Net applications through the portal. I've used the IFrame portlet on a page and just pointed the url to the location of a few of our .Net applications. It appears that the application loads, allows for file downloads as it should, can still detect Active Directory, and even the jquery we're using to trigger the auto-save in the background works just it should.
My question: is there a better way to do this? I know it's not ideal.
Another question along these same lines is: do you know of a more robust IFrame portlet that will let you set the width and height of the portlet or will dynamically re-size itself based on the contents it's loading?
You can also use the Web Application Bridge, which might be the best solution for existing applications. For new development, I would recommend wsrp with netunity.
You can use Iframe to display the links of the existing .NET application.
So there wont be any need to re write the entire code.
Hope this helps :)
My understanding is that you can use WSRP to do this. NetUnity is one option. MS apparently has one as well. Would love to hear how it goes.
I need a bit of clarity regarding whats possible with grails plugins before committing my self to a corner a month or two down the line,
We have two applications built in Grails what share the same model, however we are looking at creating a single application which will control the ACL and add the two Grails applications as plugins.
Now the two applications are very extensive and they have their own controllers, views and routing.
Is it still viable to integrate the two applications as grails plugins or is there another better way of doing it. In the past I have found that following a quick simple guide / tutorial on how to create a grails plugin for instance, might not really explain the other issues I might encounter as I take the two big applications which use plugins of their own and try to convert them to plugins...
Any heads up information would be appreciated.
Everyone's needs are different. I'll simply explain what we've done on a current project and then you can use that to help make your decision.
We have a "common" grails plugin. This plugin contains all of our domains, controllers, layouts, views, css, images, and js that are shared throughout our grails applications. The common plugin has the spring-security-core plugin installed since the security domains are, well, common to all the other applications. However, each application that uses are common plugin still specifies its own security. It uses the domains from common as well as the spring-security-core plugin installed in common, but each application can control its own access points and lock down the URLs that need locked down.
We have an admin application
We have a customer facing application which has both secured and un-secure content.
And we have a couple other internal only applications that use our common plugin.
We've been at this for 6 months and haven't noticed any drawbacks to this approach.
Just looking for some help/suggestions with this. I require my own server for an upcoming project that will be hosting users websites. I want to build a control panel the user can log into and modify their website which will be stored elsewhere on the server. This all seems easy enough, It's just managing domains and emails that confuse me.
What should I look for to manage domain names and point them to the correct website and also what would be the best way to manage email accounts/set up new ones etc. I want to avoid cPanel/WHM if possible, I'm looking to control most things through the control panel I will be building. So any suggestions on this would be useful as well, as I will be wanting to add email accounts through php (Can be done using a shell I assume?).
I will also be wanting to measure bandwidth used on the websites contained in each users directory, any suggestions on making this possible?
I'm really looking for some suggestions on what software to use to set this up, any advice would be really helpful!
Thanks,
Graeme
It sounds like you've got a lot of creative room. May I suggest a web framework? Django. With it you can build out a nice control panel, it's template system is clean and concise. It's also based on Python and thats why I suggest it. If there is a python module for it, you can use it in Django... so things like altering, creating, etc. local data/files is a breeze. you simply us Python (you can even forget it's "django"), crunch your data and then spit it out (into django... out to templates.. to display to the user).
You'll likely want AJAXY biznazz, their is a nice Django App for that, Dajax. Django has a rich and helpful community and tons of resources. Just hop on GitHub.com and search for Django, You'll find tons of stuff.
Im building a DNS Control Panel with it. Which sounds like a minimal version of what you're doing.
Imagine having developed a classical website with java&struts.
Now you customer is learning that redeploying the application to change an image or a text is a significant cost. And it asks to add a function to the site: cms-like handling of the contents (editing, versioning, approved publishing).
How would you handle this request? Would you develop it in the webapp? Would you merge the webapp with a CMS? Would tou MOVE the webapp into a cms? Would you run away?
Building in simple CMS support isn't too difficult (provided putting the authentication and security isn't too stressful in your framework) but it can get really fiddly if you need to provide a whole WYSIWYG environment where they can upload content and format it.
If they want the whole lot, I'd consider rebuilding inside an existing CMS. If they can cope with simple edits, build that into your app.
But the thing that'll sway it for them is the cost. You need to let them know they're paying for you to re-build (and give them a quote so they know how much it's going to cost them). You can't swallow that cost unless you massively misunderstood the brief.
If they're not happy with what you've got so far but don't want to pay you for building it up further, explain you're happy to bring the original brief to fruition but invoice them for your time so far (or percentage of the contract if it's project based) and let them think about it.
If you cocked up the brief, you either walk away not or partially -paid and lose a customer, or take it on the chin and try to do better next time.