Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Plan for the Portal Personalization Server
You might want to use the Personalization rules engine in an environment outside of IBM® WebSphere® Portal Express. For example, you could use Personalization in a Web service which provides a personalized XML content stream. Alternatively, you could use it to generate an RSS feed. In these cases, Personalization is used as a service which is consumed by other software components on other servers. A full WebSphere Portal Express installation incurs some administrative and infrastructure overhead. When portlet rendering is not required, such as when the output of a service is an XML or RSS feed, you could install the Personalization rules engine in an environment outside of WebSphere Portal Express. You configure a Personalization standalone server – an Application Server with the Personalization rules engine (without WebSphere Portal Express) – using the installer on theWebSphere Portal Express V6.0 CD # 5.
The servlet which receives the publishing request can also run outside of WebSphere Portal Express. With the exception of pznwpsruntime.jar, which includes the WebSphere Portal Express user resource collection, all the Personalization run-time libraries can run outside of WebSphere Portal Express.
You can install the repository, which stores the rules and campaigns, outside of WebSphere Portal Express. In this configuration, the DB2® Content Manager Runtime Edition repository does not use WebSphere Portal Express Access Control.
The only components which are not installed when running outside of a Portal system are the Personalization portlets, including the authoring portlets and the Personalized List portlet. As a consequence, once artifacts are published to a Personalization rules engine without WebSphere Portal Express installed there is no way to view those artifacts directly on that system. You need a WebSphere Portal Express installation, either a test environment installation or a full WebSphere Portal Express installation, in order to author rules and campaigns.
Publishing to a server which does not have WebSphere Portal Express installed is no different than publishing to a server where Portal is installed.
WebSphere Application Server considerations
The Personalization Server has the same requirements as WebSphere Portal Express in regards to the WebSphere Application Server product. For details on which versions of WebSphere Application Server are supported, refer to Supported hardware and software.
The following warning messages appear in the standard out log when using Personalization without Portal installed and in the Rational Application Developer test environment.
- ConnectionMan W J2CA0075W: An active transaction should be present while processing method allocateMCWrapper.
- ConnectionMan W J2CA0075W: An active transaction should be present while processing method initializeForUOW.
To work around this problem, you can disable text search from IBM Content Manager. You can disable text search by altering the icm.properties file in wps/jcr/lib/com/ibm/icm/. Alter the line which reads as: jcr.textsearch.enabled=true to be jcr.textsearch.enabled=false.
Alternatively, if you require text search for your installation, you can hide this message by changing the j2c.properties file in was_root/properties as follows:
- Uncomment the following lines:
<cm-properties> <manageCachedHandles>false</manageCachedHandles> <logMissingTranContext>true</logMissingTranContext> </cm-properties> - Change true to false for line: <logMissingTranContext>false</logMissingTranContext>
After installing, restart your server.
Database considerations
Personalization no longer has an independent administrative or authoring database. Personalization uses the DB2 Content Manager Runtime Edition for storage of rules, campaigns, and other objects both during the authoring phase and runtime phase.
Two optional functions of Personalization require the use of a database.
- The Feedback function uses a database to store logged information. The amount of database space that is required for logging depends on the amount of traffic to the site. The amount of data that is logged per login-enabled page can vary.
- The LikeMinds recommendation engine uses a database to store information gathered through the logging APIs. LikeMinds uses this information in order to make recommendations.