IBM Rational application Developer V7.5 Portal Toolkit, part 4th

Static page Aggregation

Introduction: For static page aggregation, you can create a portal page from a static HTML layout or template in a ibm®websphere®portal V6.1 project. This step-by-Step guide you through the use of Ibm®rational®application Developer V7.5 to create, design, edit, and aggregate such static layouts, targeting the Portal Server runtime environment. Following the steps in this article, you do not need to know much about the basics of portal API.

System Requirements

The author assumes that you have ibm®rational®application Developer V7.5 installed on your computer and that you have ibm®websphere®portal V6.1 server installed on a local or remote system with administrator privileges.

Benefits of using static pages

By now, web designers have used simple web technologies like HTML, Waterfall Worksheets (CSS), and JavaScript to design the overall look of the site, but Portlets is usually made up of java™ or Java™server Page (jsp™) created by developers. Now, by aggregating portlets with static Web pages, you can use static page aggregation (SPA) to develop the potential of portlets. You can do this by using simple HTML tags in a static web page to create a complete portal page.

Figure 1. Aggregating a portlet in HTML layout

With simple web technology, you can design the layout of a Web site by using Web Administration tools that you like, such as Page Designer in Rational application Developer, or a simple text editor. You can better control the layout of a page than using the portal layout model.

You can use portlets as a dynamic element, using a container as a placeholder for portlets in a page. Display them by using a server-side aggregation, Ajax, or an IFrame element. You can also use portlets in static pages to communicate.

Static page aggregation is not only easy to use, but it is powerful in developing portlets functionality along with simple WEB technologies such as CSS and JavaScript. This article first describes the concept of spa and then guides you step-by-step through the use of spa and Rational application Developer V7.5:

First, create a portal project and then a static layout of the portal page.

Next, create a portal project to add to the static page.

Then, create a portal page with a static layout (static page).

Next, edit the static page to add themes, portal containers, and portal windows.

Then publish your project to see the results of the first simple action listed above.

Then create a theme for the static layout, creating skins for the portlets in the static page.

Next, you can use the dynamic features of portlets to automatically generate a navigation bar for your Web site.

After that, use the internationalization features to make your static pages accessible to all parts of the world.

Then use the static layout resource profile to create additional pages and edit the static pages that you created earlier.

Finally, publish the portal Web site that you created that contains static pages.

Key terminology

Static layout

The layout of the page is built on a normal HTML page and can contain references to portlets. Conversely, the layout of a dynamic portal page is defined by the database in the server and managed by the page editor.

Static page

A static page that references a static layout. Static pages can be part of any location in the portal page technology. In addition to passing, it behaves like a default portal page, such as access control.

Dynamic layout

The standard portal layout, consisting of rows and columns, that are persisted in the database.