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For those of you that have installed PEP out there (and to some extent, Analytics before that), BEA started to embrace the concept of providing web-based configuration for their products. Analytics was pretty rudimentary, and PEP started to look a little better with its standardized approach. But the “Configuration Manager” is now going main-stream, and [...]

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of working with the BEA engineering team on a small part of “Shasta”, the 6.5 version of the AquaLogic Portal.  Now that the release date is imminent (a couple of weeks now), we’re starting a new feature here called “ALI Insider” to get you on the [...]

We’ve written about using PTSpy to capture Publisher events before, but a lot of times network switches don’t allow UDP messages (the kind generated by this logging subsystem) to go to other machines, even on the same subnet. So even if you can add a message sender for, say, Collab, to a PTSpy instance running [...]

Today’s an easy one for you all. It’s been around forever (years!), but I usually find myself working on existing portals and not having to customize the login portlet, so I often forget about these files existing. Even if you’ve got a mature portal, if nothing else these are working adaptive tag reference samples that [...]

Virtually all text strings in the portal have been extracted to XML files, mostly for internationalization. Check out %PORTAL_HOME%\ptportal\6.1\i18n\en\ for these files. Why should you care? Here are a couple reasons: I had a customer who didn’t like calling Communities Communities. They wanted to call them “Spaces” or something like that. By simply doing a [...]

You can do lots of interesting things with Javascript and style sheets. Take printing: there is not only a Javascript event that you could use to get the browser to print a page: <a href=”#” onClick=”window.print(); return false;”>Print</a> … you can also use style sheets to dynamically hide or show sections of the page: <link [...]

There are two major issues with the 6.0-6.1MP1 upgrade path that I encountered that you need to be aware of. I don’t know if these issues happen all the time, but it happened to me enough and on a variety of different environments that I thought it would be worth passing along. One of these [...]

This is an easy one: in general, you should turn off directory browsing on your image servers. This is pretty easy to do in IIS (and is similarly easy with Java app servers); just uncheck the “Directory browsing” checkbox: If your image server only contains standard default images, this usually isn’t that big of a [...]

This post is a little more technical than we usually write about in the blog, but it was an interesting exercise that I thought was worth sharing. The IDK, or AquaLogic Interaction Development Kit allows remote code to load and manipulate ALUI objects. This is done primarily via SOAP calls to the WS API Server. [...]

The Aqualogic portal has a neat feature called the Parallel Portal Engine, or PPE. This allows you to set up multiple remote servers (for custom code, or even clustering some of the Aqualogic products, like Collaboration Server) and get the portal to distribute requests to all of them. The way this works is you start [...]