What you need to get started

To publish and serve pages that use all the functionality of Personalization, you need:

• Rational Application Developer V6 with Personalization

  Rational Application Developer is the development environment for creating classes for accessing your user and content resources in the customer data store, creating templates, creating Personalization content spots, add the content spots to Web pages, and publishing the content spots and pages to the run-time environment. These Personalization features can be added to Rational Application Developer Web projects.

  Rational Application Developer, together with Personalization, provides support and processing for the Personalization rules. The Personalization server includes the rules engine, resource engine, and related APIs that are installed as an add-on to your WebSphere Application Server. The Personalization workspace is a browser interface to the server that supports rule creation and editing, campaign creation, and assignment of rules to content spots created in Rational Application Developer. The Personalization resource wizards include a content and user resource wizard, a content spot wizard, and a template wizard. The Personalization Resource Console installed with the Personalization server allows for managing the the run-time configuration of resource collections, campaigns, and logging settings.

• A defined collection of Personalization resources

  Each Rational Application Developer project needs a defined collection of Personalization resources. A resource can be user data or Web content (such as text, a graphic, an applet, or JavaScript) usually from an external data store such as a database of user information and business objects. Each resource has one or more fixed attributes defined by the schema for the resource. For example, your user data might contain the name, address, and phone number of a customer or employee visiting your Web site. A schema for Web content might include attributes about the content, such as which Web visitors the content applies to, or whether the content is confidential. It might also include the source or the URL for the actual content.

  Defining a collection of Personalization resources requires a set of Java classes that conform to the Personalization API and map to the data in your data store. The .class and .hrf (XML) files are shared by the Personalization features of the Application Server and the development environment. These files must be available in your project. The .class files also need to be on your Web application class path. This is managed for you when you place your .java files in the project source path.

  You define resource collections using the Personalization resource wizards. The wizards walk you through selecting the data you need from your relational database tables, building the resource Java classes and XML files for you, and putting them into your project. You can access a local database running on your own machine or a remote database anywhere on your network. You will need a user id and password with the capability to read the database.

 

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