INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Information Management

Information Management

Introduction

Software technology is undergoing relentless transition from monolithic systems, constructed according to a single overall design, into loosely coupled distributed and heterogeneous systems, whose component parts may be written in different languages, run on different platforms, and be designed, constructed, or even maintained under different administrative domains. A reference will be made to such systems as open distributed software systems, or open systems, in part because their components may change dynamically, or leave the system, which new components may be added to a system at any time. The concept of service oriented architecture (SOA) represents an outstanding example of such open systems, among others. For such an open system to be dependable it must be managed dynamically, and the importance of management has been well recognized by the SOA community. The system needs to be monitored continuously, in order to detect failures, inefficiencies, and attacks; and it must be controlled, while a system operates, in order to deal with such problems. Much attention has been paid to the management of open systems. Some of them, such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) became industry standards for the respective types of industries, and they have a strong impact on academic research as well. Therefore, all the issues related to Information Management and delivery in Web scenarios will be discussed in detail.

Overview of web based technologies

The default integration of web content into a portal uses a web content viewer portlet that runs locally on the portal server. This enables a person to leverage the tight integration between Web Sphere Portal and Web Content Manager and get the best performance and maintainability. However, in cases where some web content needs to be embedded into a portal page, the web content viewer portlet can also be accessed remotely via Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). Pre-rendering is the process of traversing the website and rendering the content of each page into a static HTML file. Any user can automatically pre-render the website based on a timer or manually trigger the pre-render. The HTML files can then be served directly from a HTTP server. Pre-rendering is useful for pure “brochure ware” sites that don't change that often and have a really high load. Pre-rendering has several limitations, such as no dynamic content, no access control checking, and it does not work together with portal pages (Byrd, 2000, 208).

Servlet rendering is the delivery of the content via the Web Content Manager Servlet. When using Web Content Manager Servlet delivery, a user is bound to the Web Content Manager features and cannot use any IBM Web Sphere Portal features in the website. Portlet rendering is the delivery of the web content via the web content viewer portlet and through Web Sphere Portal. This delivery mechanism provides a tightly integrated portal and web content management system that is fully dynamic and very flexible. A website is only as good as its content and the way the ...