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Here’s an interesting article by Yahoo: “Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site“. While you may not be able to optimize some of the ALUI portal’s less-than-stellar behaviors related to performance (really, 1+ Megabyte .js files?), these tips can help eke out even more performance from your custom code. Some aren’t really relevant [...]

“A poor craftsman blames his tools”. While I don’t know who exactly to attribute that quote to, I do know that the corollary to the rule is that the right tools can make the craftsman. A feature we plan on bringing to this blog is a bunch of “Cool Tools” entries to share some of [...]

Here’s an undocumented little trick for debugging database transactions. The .NET ALUI portal uses DataDirect’s ADO.NET database drivers for Oracle and SQL Server, so there are some settings that can be used to extract a lot (a LOT) of logging information about the state of the connection pool and SQL queries being executed. Note that [...]

One of the most-overlooked concepts in multi-tiered architectures like the ALUI portal is caching. I am constantly reminding clients about the nature of the HTTP transactions made for a portal page: “browser to portal, portal to back-end server”. I’ve touched on the first transaction a bit (more to come on this!), but today I wanted [...]

Logging is an important part of portal diagnostics. In addition to using PTSpy for real-time diagnostics, the ALUI portal now ships with a Plumtree Logger service that can capture events and record them to a file. The great thing about this service is that it uses log4j to configure how and what events are recorded. [...]

Ever run into problems downloading the portal installer on a Windows 2003 Server? By default, IE has “Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration” enabled, and when you start up IE you see this message: When you try to download an installer, you get a message at the top of the browser window that says “Your current [...]

Errors are never pretty to users who just want their portal to work. But sometimes they’re inevitable, such as when a user cancels the Basic Authentication prompt when SSO is configured in the portal. Here’s how you can make them a little prettier. All app servers (we’ll use IIS in this example) allow you to [...]

One of the best ways to get ideas on what can be done with the ALUI portal is taking a look at other portals. Sure, most of them are installed behind the corporate firewall and are inaccessible to the rest of us (with the exception of some screen shots or live demos at events like [...]