Therefore, at the Magnolia Conference, it was interesting to see the proposition the guys from NRG Edge are putting together. They are currently building an online banking solution, the Marketing Portal aspect of which is driven by Magnolia.

We like this on a number of levels.

Firstly, it’s another great example of how Magnolia is being used outside of it’s ‘comfort zone’ web CMS area, it’s really encouraging to see an intermediary organisation making a commitment like this to the Magnolia solution. It all acts as further validation as to the quality of the Magnolia product for when we find ourselves speaking to potential clients.

Further, for us maybe in the future, it gives us some ideas about how we can leverage our knowledge of the Magnolia solution within our own offerings, providing the means for clients to publish and maintain products, brands and web content through a single holistic experience for both authors and users.

Plenty of food for thought.

We’ve recently come up against an excellent example of this.  While on client site, we were integrating to a credit card provider in Mule via web services.  Mule supports CXF, Axis 1 and Axis 2 as Java WS frameworks, and they all have positives and negatives so we advised the client to use the same framework as their offshore supplier had used in the back-office system to ensure support and maintenance was made easier.  We subsequently discovered that, as they had no experience of Web Service integration, the offshore supplier had used HTTPConnection and DOM – i.e. they were hard-coding each web service call.

That afternoon, we integrated all 5 webservices and used Mule’s definition XML to model the control process.  In 4 hours work we had acheived the equivalent of over 200 man days of offshore development.

Expertise was obviously the clear winner here!

To integrate Axis 1.4 into Magnolia:

1. Download the Axis distribution
2. Copy the jars into the magnoliaAuthor and magnoliaPublic WEB-INF/lib directories
3. Copy the servlet declarations from the axis web.xml into the magnolia web.xml in both auth and pub
4. Open AdminCentral and browse to Configuration
5. Open server/filters/servlets and copy log4j node, rename to AxisServlet
6. Open AxisServlet/mappings/–magnolia-pages–/patten and change to /services/*
7. Change AxisServlet/servletClass to org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisServlet
8. Change AxisServlet/servletName to AxisServet (to match the web.xml servletname)

If you now deploy a class through jws or wsdl methods (by coping the classes, wsdl and .wsdd files) into Magnolia you will be able to access it through <host>/<maginstance>/services/ServiceName?wsdl

You might want to bypass Magnolia security during development, to do that:

1. Open AdminCentral and browse to Configuration
2. Open server/filters/uriSecurity/bypasses
3. Create a new content node “services”
4. Create 2 new data nodes; “services/class” with data info.magnolia.voting.voters.URIStartsWithVoter and “services/pattern” with data /services

For our demo, we simply queried the API for a “text” content node based on a path that was passed into the method:

public String getContent (String name) throws Exception {
String returnContent = new String();
returnContent="";
try {
//get the current context
Context context = MgnlContext.getSystemContext();
//get a hierarchy manager and lookup the content node
HierarchyManager mgr = context.getHierarchyManager(ContentRepository.WEBSITE);
Content uriContent = mgr.getContent(name);
if(uriContent==null){
//oops
returnContent+=" content is null";
} else {
//get the data collection and return the text node
for(Iterator i = uriContent.getNodeDataCollection().iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
NodeData nodeData = (NodeData) i.next();
String nodeName = nodeData.getName();
if (nodeName.equals("text")) {
returnContent=nodeData.getString();
}
}
}
} catch (RepositoryException e) {
throw new Exception(e.getMessage());
}
return returnContent;
}

Axis presents this with the following WSDL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<wsdl:definitions targetNamespace="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:apachesoap="http://xml.apache.org/xml-soap" xmlns:impl="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:intf="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:wsdlsoap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<!--WSDL created by Apache Axis version: 1.4
Built on Apr 22, 2006 (06:55:48 PDT)-->
 <wsdl:types>
  <schema elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
   <element name="getContent">
    <complexType>
     <sequence>
      <element name="name" type="xsd:string"/>
     </sequence>

    </complexType>
   </element>
   <element name="getContentResponse">
    <complexType>
     <sequence>
      <element name="getContentReturn" type="xsd:string"/>
     </sequence>
    </complexType>
   </element>

  </schema>
 </wsdl:types>

   <wsdl:message name="getContentResponse">

      <wsdl:part element="impl:getContentResponse" name="parameters"/>

   </wsdl:message>

   <wsdl:message name="getContentRequest">

      <wsdl:part element="impl:getContent" name="parameters"/>

   </wsdl:message>

   <wsdl:portType name="TestWebService">

      <wsdl:operation name="getContent">

         <wsdl:input message="impl:getContentRequest" name="getContentRequest"/>

         <wsdl:output message="impl:getContentResponse" name="getContentResponse"/>

      </wsdl:operation>

   </wsdl:portType>

   <wsdl:binding name="TestWebServiceSoapBinding" type="impl:TestWebService">

      <wsdlsoap:binding style="document" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>

      <wsdl:operation name="getContent">

         <wsdlsoap:operation soapAction=""/>

         <wsdl:input name="getContentRequest">

            <wsdlsoap:body use="literal"/>

         </wsdl:input>

         <wsdl:output name="getContentResponse">

            <wsdlsoap:body use="literal"/>

         </wsdl:output>

      </wsdl:operation>

   </wsdl:binding>

   <wsdl:service name="TestWebServiceService">

      <wsdl:port binding="impl:TestWebServiceSoapBinding" name="TestWebService">

         <wsdlsoap:address location="http://localhost:8800/magnoliaAuthor/services/TestWebService"/>

      </wsdl:port>

   </wsdl:service>

</wsdl:definitions>

and an example of this in action is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope>
−
<soapenv:Body>
−
<getContentResponse>
−
<ns1:getContentReturn>
<p>yadda yadda yadda</p>
</ns1:getContentReturn>
</getContentResponse>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Of course, a twist to this approach would be to wrap the JSP rendering with Axis to take advantage of the tag libraries. We tested this with PHP 5’s SOAP Client and successfully read data from Magnolia.  In a production environment we would obviously use XPath or the Query Builder in order to search the repository, and return more complex results.

You can see a video demonstration of this here: http://bit.ly/uPreky

I’ve just finished working with a government department that was looking to further utilise the large volume of content (running to millions of items) stored in their internal web based knowledge system (essentially a glorified web CMS). However, this department was hamstrung by the fact that the repository was built on a well known, Java based, proprietary CMS solution with a nearly non-existent API, meaning that we either exposed the information via the CMS’ own portal product (a non-starter, bearing in mind we were trying to move away from the proprietary nature of the system) or, as happened implement our own interface…

…Which is how we get to CMIS, which simply put is a specification to define a set of protocols allowing CRUD like operations in order to interact with a Content Repository via web services – This has the potential to make Systems Integrators lives easier, and therefore offer better value to customers.
CMIS could be seen as moving the ideas of JCR further along – Indeed, the groups looking to make this happen are the same as those who worked towards the JCR specs. However, on this occasion, Microsoft are also along for the ride.

EMC have already released a version of their flagship Documentum product that complies with the CMIS standards and others are already looking to do the same.

CMIS is by no means an accepted standard, however it potentially promises solve a number of core business requirements (seamlessly linking apps. to multiple repositories, enabling the decoupling of management apps from the content repository etc.) However, it still has a long way to go, but we will be watching closely to see how it develops.

Sceneric consultants are experts at optimising our clients platforms to ensure the hardware is properly utilised.  Our consultants have deployed applications on clustered IBM Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle iAS and JBoss servers, and have created Coldfusion Enterprise clusters on JRun 4.0 leading to significant performance and stability gains.

The key thing to remember is that Java runs within a virtual machine which has limits ordinarily significantly smaller than the avialable hardware.   Without explicit tuning expertise applied, the applications running within the virutal machine will not be performing to their optimum potential.

• ATG’s ability to rapidly develop a new online store, and to maximise conversions with personalisation software is still market leading
• With the advent of Web 2.0, the personalization, user profiling, content management, data exposure and integration functionality made me realise that ATG has been a leader in this area, providing Web 2.0 functionality in the early days of the web

In the early naughties it was often difficult to explain the capabilities of ATG to users – with Web 2.0 ideas becoming prevalent it’s now much easier to explain them leading me to think that ATG was indeed ahead of it’s time.