Content that you personalize

We can personalize specific content spots of the intranet and internet website. For example, we can personalize a list of new articles that appears on the website based on the visitors geographical location. We can personalize employee bulletins for specific groups of employees, such as changes to benefit plans. We can personalize a product list on a commerce website.

When selecting the content to personalize, consider the associations between the content and visitors. For an intranet site, we may have some articles intended for a specific group of employees, such as managers. Effective personalization is based on defining what content to be seen by each type of visitor.

After determining what to personalize, create a set of resource collections and application objects to form the business vocabulary for making decisions.

Resource collections

A Java class representing and allows access to a collection of resource instances. It is similar to a database table with a fixed schema and a number of rows. Resource collection classes implement the com.ibm.websphere.personalization.resources.ResourceDomain3 interface. Rational Application Developer provides a wizard that can create resource collections that store data in SQL databases or LDAP repositories.

Application objects

An application object is a Java object existing at a known location in the request context. To define an application object specify the class name and a key to find the class. Personalization calls methods on these objects during rule execution and uses their results in its decision making. Application Objects that implement the SelfInitializingApplicationObject interface are automatically instantiated as needed by Personalization.

The web developer has two options for developing the objects.

• IBM Rational Application Developer includes personalization wizards.

• There is a set of public programming interface for Personalization.

The web developer must also register the resource collections and application objects with the Personalization server. There are two ways the developer can register them:

• Use the Personalization Browser to import the .hrf file that defines the resource collection.
• Manually create the references in the Personalization Browser.

Parent Personalization

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