first lesson of portal architecture

the first thing that struck me: Edge Components Caching Proxy (CP) is so ignored into our customers solutions, here in .ro

Even when looking and searching for resources world-wide I seem to have a hard time finding any good resources of people trying stuff and sharing with community ...

I am not into the sales/licensing stuff, but I think that any license of WebSphere Portal comes with entitlement to install/use the Caching Proxy.

So, why do I see so ignorance for this product which actually enhance the Portal performance ? How did I see this ? On my own experience, and here's how I saw it:
On my laptop (with 3GB RAM, well..) I installed two Linux virtual machines:
- one has Portal 6.1.0.3
- the other one has IBM HTTP Server with WAS plugin, plus the Edge Caching Proxy. IHS responds on 8080, CP responds on 80 and forward all traffic to IHS.

After I finished the setup (it took me a long time due to other stuff I am dealing with), I noticed a boost in Portal performance when accessed through the Caching Proxy. I mean, the performance is crystal clear visible when accessing: http://my_host_name:8080/wps/portal (without CP), versus http://my_host_name:80/wps/portal (with CP)

And, by no means I am an expert into Caching Proxy stuff, not just yet.
Sure, Portal has several layers of caching, out of which DynaCache is/can/should be used programatically by developers, but usually developers don't bother with it. Or, our developers here in .ro don't bother ...

So, when architectural decisions are in my hand, I am not going without a CP, set-up and used as a reverse proxy for the Portal. I think it should be installed whenever you get the chance, it finally looks good for the Portal solution itself.

more details to come, as I will learn more :)

websphere virtual portal and websphere content manager (WCM)

As I said before, administration of the portal is a pain :)

scenario: you create a virtual portal and want to use WCM.
symptom: no WCM authoring portlets on your new virtual portal. What to do ?
solution: using xmlaccess.sh (for *nix), do this:
>cd PortalInstall/bin
>./xmlaccess.sh -url http://PortalHost:10038/wps/config/VirtualPortalContextURL -in ../wcm/deploy/DeployWcmAuthoringPortletAndPage.xml

where:
PortalInstall for Linux is usually /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/
PortalHost could be localhost ar your Portal hostname
10038 is the SOAP port for accessing the configuration of the Portal. Could be different in your environment
VirtualPortalContextURL is the URL context of your virtual portal.