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Overview of the WebLogic Personalization Server
This chapter is about provides an overview of all the tools and components provided with the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server.
This topic includes the following sections:
What Is WebLogic Personalization Server?
The WebLogic Commerce Server is a complete solution for building personalized e-commerce sites. Within the WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS), personalization functionality is delivered by the WebLogic Personalization Server (WLPS).
Personalization is the means by which Web content developers can tailor an application to a particular individual or group based on any number of criteria. The criteria can be predefined user attributes such as age and gender, or can be based on behavioral information gathered as the user navigates a site.
Using WebLogic Personalization Server, you can build Java-based Internet pages and sites with dynamic, personalized document content. You can customize what content gets delivered based on individual user profiles. WebLogic Personalization Server has a built-in rules editor that you use with JavaServer Pages (JSP) tags to deliver a responsive, customized experience for users.
With WebLogic Personalization Server you can build a wide range of portal types, from business-to-consumer "megaportals" to business-to-business enterprise portals. What this means for your e-commerce enterprise is a flexible, personalized Web presence that listens and responds to your customers and partners based on what you define as important factors.
WebLogic Personalization Server makes extensive use of J2EE mechanisms such as Java Server Pages (JSP) with tag library extensions, session and entity Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), and Java Naming Directory Interface (JNDI).
WebLogic Personalization Server is a complete solution that enables rapid deployment of adaptable and personalized applications, allowing your businesses to extend competitive advantage and accelerate response time to customer and market demands.
The Advisor
The Advisor ties together the services and components in the WebLogic Personalization Server to deliver personalized content. It does this by matching content to information contained in the user profile. In the rest of this chapter, we will look at each of the WebLogic Personalization Server services in turn, but first let's look briefly at the Advisor.
The Advisor provides an embedded rules engine to classify a user and create a dynamic query into a content database to return personalized content for that user. The Advisor is an EJB that can be accessed directly, but is typically accessed through a set of JSP tags. These JSP tags allow HTML developers to assemble dynamic pages without writing any Java code. The Advisor was built to scale for large e-commerce Web sites. It uses a pooling and caching mechanism to keep rules engines ready for rapid evaluation of Personalization rules. For more information about the Advisor, see the chapter "Creating Personalized Applications with the Advisor" in the WebLogic Personalization Server Developer's Guide.
User Management
In the WebLogic Personalization Server, user management is provided through a set of administration tools, or alternatively through any WebLogic Server Realm. Typically, new sites that rely on self-registration will use the WebLogic Personalization Server user management tools. For sites with large collections of existing users in the form of customers or employees, the WebLogic Realm support can provide added security through products such as LDAP servers.
For more information about User Management, see Creating and Managing Users.
Rules Management
A rule can be thought of as an if-then construct. The left side of the expression (the if statement) sets the conditions that the rule must meet. The right side of the rule states the action to take if the conditions are met. In the WebLogic Personalization Server, there are two types of rules: Classification rules and Content selection rules.
Classification rules are used to classify users. A classification rule may be employed to determine if the user fits a certain classification, given the user's and current group's property values or the Request or Session properties. So, for example, if a user is over 35, under 65, and is male, then the user is considered a middle age man. If a classifier rule evaluates to true, it returns a Classification object with the same name as the classification. The results of this rule can be used by a page developer to vary the content displayed based on one or more classifications.
Content rules Content selector rules, if they evaluate to true, will result in a query that can be sent to the content management component. The if parts of the content selectors can make decisions based on all the same types of criteria as the classification rules, and also can use the current time to constrain when the rule is in effect. They can also refer to classifier rules, so fundamental categorizations can be reused. The result of a content selector is a ContentQuery object, which contains a query expression that can be directly submitted to the content management component.
Rules in WebLogic Personalization Server are organized and saved in rule sets. A rule set may have any combination of classifiers and content selectors, which can be called by name using the JSP tags.
For more information on rules, see Creating and Managing Rules.
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Property Set Management
In the Property Set Management tool, you create property sets and define the properties that make up those property sets. Property Set Management provides schema details to personalization server subsystems such as Rules Management and Portal Management. Group, user, request and session schemas can be created in Property Set Management. Such profile schemas prescribe sets of profile attributes. A property can be considered a name/value pair. Property sets serve as namespaces for properties, so that properties can be conveniently grouped, and so that multiple properties with the same name can be defined.
For more information about property sets, see Creating and Managing Property Sets.
Portal Management
Portal Management provides an HTML windowing toolkit that allows Web site developers, group administrators and actual end users to personalize, customize and individualize the layout, look, and content of an e-commerce site. It provides these features through a set of JSP tags, EJBs and administration tools. JSP developers who choose to use the Portal product will develop portlets in JSP. These portlets are mini-windows to information, content or application services that are available in the portal. Portlets can be minimized, maximized in their own window, edited, and provided with help. Once you have built the portlets, a portal administrator can pick and choose portlets and make them available in the portal. Then, a portal user controls the layout and visibility of these mini-windows.
For more information about portals and portlets, see the chapter Creating and Managing Portals.
Foundation Classes and Utilities
The Foundation component provides a set of objects and utilities to support personalization activities. This component provides EJB objects to support HTTP handling, including object definition for request and session objects, as well as object-based utilities specifically designed to support portals.
Foundation includes the Flow Manager, a servlet implementation that allows the hot-deployment of applications within the WebLogic Application Server. Flow Manager also adds flexibility to navigation through the system-it allows navigation information to move off the JSP page and into a single point of control. Using a destination determiner and a destination handler, the Flow Manager dynamically determines a destination for a given page request and dynamically handles it.
For more information about the Foundation component, see the chapter "Foundation Classes and Utilities" in the WebLogic Personalization Server Developer's Guide.
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