Hi,
I want to add some more words to the topic of incorporating documents from
the web into the portal. I am working with Marcus and refereing to David
Sean Taylor's answer on Marcus' posting concerning an "advanced file
server".
> Your discussion is very relevant to some of the problems I am
> experiencing.
> My portal is aggregating web pages from several different sources, and
> frequently from the same company's intranet where they seem to reuse
> stylesheets and scripts, but they make minor changes to them
> So yes, you are describing a real headache for me right now.
It was and still is a headache to us, because Jetspeed is doing nothing
along these lines to help incorporate arbitrary documents into the portal.
So we started to write an AdvancedFileServer which forwards cookies from the
portal's sources to the client's browser and vice versa, rewrites relative
URLs to absolute URLs, redirects HTML hyperlinks to the portal which then
gathers the originally requested document and incorporates this into the
portal, redirects HTML form actions to the portal in the same ways as
hyperlinks are redirected, includes JavaScript files into the page, so that,
e.g. JavaScript variables or HTML form input variables can be escaped to
avoid name clashes and to allow addressing and assigning escaped HTML form
input variables inside JavaScript code.
CSS could be handled in the same way as JavaScript includes: Load them,
escaped them and include them into the returned page.
In summary: There is still much more work to do, also due to the great
amount of wrong but browser-accepted HTML code in the web, but right now we
can e.g. include www.amazon.com into a portlet and fill our shopping cart
right inside our personlized portal page or request finance.yahoo.com to
list quotes whose symbols we entered inside a portlet.
Beside the fact that the solution is incomplete and will stay incomplete for
a long time, the actual portlet approach helps, but isn't enough. We need to
access the generated portal page header and the table row and cell the
content is stored in.
I am new to the portlet API discussion, but thought that incorporating
arbitrary documents from the web into the portal should somehow be taken
into consideration when thinking about something like a portlet API. In any
case this topic should be adressed by the community to avoid so many people
either rewriting their content or writing something similar to the
AdvancedFileServer we had to write.
Thanks,
Vedran
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