On Jul 31, 2007, at 3:57 PM, Parker Grimes wrote:

> I would also be interested to know how other schools have  
> approached this. We are considering making the portal guest page  
> the default browser home page on all of our campus computer labs.  
> We wouldn't want the page to be completely static, for instance we  
> would like a weather portlet and some campus news RSS feeds to be  
> displayed. It seems like a waste of our uPortal resources to be  
> required to render all of that stuff all of the time. What about  
> "mimicking" the portal home page with a simpler technology like  
> php, ruby, or django? Or is it not that big of an issue to just let  
> uPortal handle the load assuming we have caching working on our side?
>
> On 7/31/07, George Lindholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I'm thinking about putting a static version of the guest page in  
> front
> of our
> uPortal to minimize the guest sessions. So I just wondering what other
> sites have done and what their experiences have been?

myRutgers always took the static welcome page route. If you visit  
https://my.rutgers.edu (the only part of myRutgers outsiders can  
really get to, other than the tour) -- that page is basically just a  
static HTML page served up by Apache. I know myRutgers also includes  
a Session Management hook that I think was originally obtained from  
UBC -- if you are interested Faizan may be able to provide more  
details. If enough people are interested, this may even be a good  
candidate for inclusion in uPortal 3 under the currently being  
discussed path forward [1].

Having said that... myRutgers trades low resource consumption for a  
relatively static front page. In the past we had tossed around ideas  
for possibly periodically generating the page using something like  
Cron, or switching to a JSP. A session=false JSP, backed with some  
cached SpringMVC-wired beans doing RSS retrieval and WeatherService  
lookups for example should be quite performant.

While Guest layout is likely a reasonable approach for many, and  
gives interesting options of easily customizing the front page based  
on attributes like IP, or referrer using the same frameworks as the  
rest of the portal, you also lose many of the benefits of the  
layouts, since you don't have a lot of user attributes, and you can't  
persist user changes. Especially if you're doing lightweight content  
integration into your portal using something like RSS or web- 
services, duplicating a simplified layout via another technology is  
probably low-effort to meet this particular use case.

Jason

--

Jason Shao
Application Developer
Rutgers University, Office of Instructional & Research Technology
v. 732-445-8726 | f. 732-445-5539 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http:// 
jay.shao.org



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