What is new - next generation Web user interface features

Learn about new portal features that pertain to the next generation type of Web user interface.

Compared to its beginnings Web technology has recently evolved towards a new direction. In the public this evolution has been named Web 2.0. This term does not describe a new type of technology, but has been used in a broad manner to describe a change to a more user centered focus. Among the benefits are improved customer and service orientation, increased user activities, easier communication and collaboration, better usability, faster performance, etc.

WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.1 offers several new technical features that can be related to this next generation type of Web user interface as they greatly enhance the portal user experience:

The portal provides improved performance, as portal pages and portlets are rendered faster, and load is moved from the server to the clients.
The user experience of the portal behavior is more similar to that of a desktop.
Portlet development becomes easier for portlet programmers.

Within portal, the new features are implemented as follows:

Client side aggregation: The portal can use client side aggregation (CSA) instead of server side aggregation (SSA). This has the following advantages:
- Faster rendering and performance
- Desktop like user experience
- Existing portlets that were written to the server side programming model can be tied in by using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). For example, such portlets can be refreshed individually rather than rerender the whole page.
Client side portlet programming model: You can use the client side programming model for your portlets. You can do everything with the client side programming model that you can do with the server side portlet programming model. Additionally, the client side programming model has the following advantages:
- Improved user experience by faster response and performance.
- User customization is done locally, and therefore faster. A fragment that contains the customization is later sent to the server and saved.
- User customization of user profile, preferences, and changes to the portlet state are done locally, and therefore with a faster response time. A fragment that contains the customization is later sent to the server and saved.
- The user experience is consistent between both client side aggregation and server side aggregation. The user cannot tell the difference between CSA and SSA, except that CSA performs better.
- The use of the CSA architecture for portlets in your portal is optional. SSA is provided as a fallback option. For example, if the browser does not support JavaScript, the "old" portal rendering procedure is still available.
Semantic tagging: You can use semantic tagging. This has the following advantages:
- Allows easier C2A ?
- You can adopt within your company more easily as it is now easier to handle portal tags. For example, you can write tags and make them available centrally, and UI developers can reuse these tags for in their protelst for various purposes.
- Content editors can add meaningful semantic tags to portlets without requiring portlet development knowledge.
- You can embed content from other sources. for example, from a HTTP or .NET server.
You can write your own advanced Web application and build it on top of new REST (Representational State Transfer) services that provide the XML request information.
Web 2.0 portal theme: The portal now offers a Web 2.0 theme that works with the client side aggregation.
Controller SPI: The Controller SPI is a new public portal interface. It is not directly related to the new type of Web user experience, but it allows you to perform certain administrative tasks more easily.

Terminology

These are terms that are used in the documentation for the new features:

SSA: Server Side Aggregation. This means aggregation based on JSPs that are executed on the Server. This is the "old" portal aggregation model; this still works as before.
CSA: Client Side Aggregation. This means aggregation based on JavaScript and XSLT transformations that are executed on the client. This is the new aggregation model that provides an improved user experience by faster response and performance.
Pure Server Side Portlet: This is a normal server side portlet that uses Java & JSPs; it usually uses no JavaScript. Portlets that are written to the client side model use no or few JSPs.
AJAX Portlet: This is a normal server side portlet that uses lots of JavaScript and AJAX technologies and less Java & JSPs.
DPR: Dynamic Portlet Rendering.
Rest: Representational State Transfer.

Leftovers

This is input which we need to place in the right context later:

Setup / Config / Admin

Under portal ConfigService.properties:
com.ibm.portal.dpr = true | false

You can use this property to globally enable or disable the dynamic portlet refresh (DPR). This is mainly needed for SSA; CSA requires DPR to be enabled.
Portlet initializing parameters for portlet programming; to be placed in the portlet XML:
wps.csa.enforce.refresh = true | false

Use this parameter to enable or disable portlet application dependency filter for a portlet. The default is false. If you set this to true, all portlets in the portlet application are considered to be dependent on each other.

com.ibm.portal.portlet.vary-header

Use this parameter to set a portlet specific vary header.