Development resources for IBM WCM/WebSphere - websphere

I recently started a new position at a company that uses IBM's WebSphere Portal, and it is completely new to me. I was wondering if there was a good resource anyone knew for development techniques using said platform.
Basically what I've been asked to do is create a dynamic newsletter page to speed up the publishing time for a new set of newsletters/articles. I have no idea how to generate dynamic content with WebSphere so that when a new article is published, it updates a landing page with a link to the new article.
Any help at all would be much appreciated!

There's a lot of information on the various IBM sites (disclaimer I work for IBM, but not with Portal). This article seems to be relevant.

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Using custom metrics in self-hosted sentry

I have started using sentry within my org and loving it so far.
I've been trying to use its performance monitoring tool with custom metrics added.
While I can add custom metrics to the transactions I'm generating in sentry_sdk (for Python), I can't get access to them on the dashboard of our self-hosted installation of sentry.
After a lot of digging, I came across this paragraph here which states that
This feature is only available to organization on our latest plans which include Dynamic Sampling. Customers on legacy plans must move to one of these plans in order to access custom metrics.
From what I gather, I believe their plans in general is to run sentry on their servers. Unless you opt-in to their self-hosted code that can be downloaded from github here.
This is absolutely a bummer because I know my org will not consider moving internal data to third-party servers.
Wondering if someone knows of a solution to this problem. If sentry folks know of (paid) options that enables this feature on self-hosted version or if someone has hacked into their open source code?
I'd also love to hear any out-of-the-box suggestion you folks might have.

Autodesk Viewer on Online Server

I have implemented the Autodesk Viewer API and it is working great as long as we are in my local environment.
But the application in which the viewer has been integrated has been deployed on online server and since then there are several bugs in the viewer. It takes longer to load the file or sometimes doesn’t load it at all.
Are there more configurations required while deploying on an online server? Especially when it is a secure one (https)?
Do we need to convert our free trial to a subscription to have higher performance ?
There still is 86 cloud credits left in the free trial but we are ready to switch to a subscription if necessary.
Your help will be highly appreciated. I'm looking forward to your answers.
Kind regards,
A.
There should be no performance differences and no limitations between running your Forge-based server code locally vs publicly, or via HTTP vs HTTPS. Please send us more details about the stack you're using in an email to forge (dot) help (at) autodesk (dot) com and we'll take a look at it.

Azure Website Performance - MVC Application Azure Websites

I am hoping to get some advice as to how i can figure out what is going on with some performance issues i am suffering from. I have a custom MVC application which is running on Azure Websites in West Europe datacenter. I have one of our offices trying to connect to the website from Singapore which is where the problem lies. If i connect to the website myself (from UK) the performance is fast and zippy. If our Singapore office tries to connect the performance is terribly slow. Sometimes getting to the initial homepage is slow (i.e. no database connections required for login page).
The page will sometimes just sit and "hang" there. What i want to know is how can i debug the performance issues with Azure? What kind of monitoring or performance checks can i do to see if it is a website / sql issue.
Thanks
I would suggest using Application Insights. It's easy to add to a custom MVC app, and will give you good info to help determine where exactly the issue lies.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-detect-triage-diagnose/
The Azure New Relic add in from the market place is very useful. There is a free version which gives you plenty of detail on browser performance and basic sql profiling.
It can provide such details as shown in the screen shot below.
You can use the Support Site Extension (http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/new-updates-to-support-site-extension-for-azure-websites/) which would allow you to look at live event logs and HTTP traffic. There are also some more advanced tools for performance issues (i.e. memory dump, event viewer logs). For a deeper dive into debugging in Azure App Service see: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK4704.
Also as Ben said, Application Insights (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-detect-triage-diagnose/) may help.

I need some guidance and help from pros to host my new app .(please read everything)

I have been making Desktop applications for last few years. but now i have quite that job and thinking about doing working for myself. I have gone through many ideas. finally i decided to develop Online billing application . Since i am new in web application i know very little about web technologies.
I am thinking about developing that application in php or asp.net with mysql database. I don't know which one is better.(you can guide me here). I don't know whether its good idea or not.but i don't want to do job and work for myself that's for sure.
its going to be a big project so I was making budget for this whole project but i don't know what kind of hosting i will need for this app because database load will be very high because its billing application. i don't know how much it will cost me.I will give user free trial for 30 days to use application and if they like they can upgrade their accounts.
So i need your help to decide what kind of hosting will be appropriate.is this ok if i use webhosting that we use to host website which will cost me $10 to $15 a month or i will have to use cloud hosting which will cost me a lot?
I hope this link will give you idea. I want to make application like this : http://www.rapid-billing.com .
pls help me out. it might me small things for you but to me it matters a lot. Thanks
Initially, you won't have very high traffic, so using a cheap, shared server should be fine. If you outgrow it, then you must have some money coming in, so the added expense of cloud hosting will be more tolerable. There's no need to go all-in before you even get going.
That said, many cloud hosts offer some amount of hosting free, which would probably suit you just as well during initial development. An added plus of starting in the cloud is that you won't have to migrate later. Off the top of my head, Google App Engine and Heroku come to mind as well-known cloud hosts with a free tier. Microsoft Azure also provides a free 3 month trial, and I imagine they'd be a good host if you choose to go with ASP.

How do you rate Oracle Portals as a platform?

A client has asked whether or not I can provide some support for his intranet which runs on Oracle Application Server Portal. Not having used this technology before I thought I'd ask if anyone else has and what they thought of developing for it.
I'm a c#/ASP.NET developer so I note with apprehension that there's no mention of .NET in the developers guide. Anyone tried to make the two work together and lived to tell the tale?
Oracle Portal was never meant to be a "platform," but instead to fulfull a specific need. When Portal was not the right solution directly, the pointer was to JDev and BC4J, plus needed other stuff. I have done extensive Oracle Portal development and for what it is, it did just fine (i.e. a "portal" to core data and applications with some exposure of that data via the portal).
The current direction of the portal product is to separate it out and have it under Oracle's "Web Center." The focus here is to make the development of portlets closer and closer to standard java development. You can find the official statement here:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdf/oracle_portal_sod_r11.pdf
Web Center is much more of a "platform" that has all the buzz words around the 2.0 technologies. Including content mgmt, portal, and a .NET WSRP integration feature/function. I would check that out in addition to portal (which does quick and easy portlets for web center too).
My company (a dedicated Oracle shop) and I have used Oracle Portal for many years and have been very successful with it. But I have to warn you against taking on this task if you do not have experience with PL/SQL (Oracle's proprietary database programming language).
An intranet built on Oracle Portal is likely to make extensive use of custom-built "portlets". You can build these in Java or PL/SQL; in my experience, 95% of all real-life portlets are built using PL/SQL.
Theoretically, if you use the latest version of Oracle Portal (10.1.4), you can consume WSRP 1.0 portlets. So if you can build portlets in .NET that will communicate using WSRP 1.0, you could integrate these. But if your customer asks for "support", they probably expect you to be able to tweak their existing portlets - and that would require PL/SQL programming experience.
There's a fairly good description of Oracle Portal on the Oracle Wiki:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+Portal
Strategically, Oracle has placed Oracle Portal is in the "Continue & Converge" category, which means that it's supported and will receive minor updates. Their strategic portal product these days is Oracle WebCenter, but that's a $125,000 per CPU behemoth; it's likely to be overkill for 99% of all sites built on Oracle Portal.
The only experience I've had with an Oracle Portal was obliquely, when I inherited a system that used one for a relatively simple maintenance web application. A large part of my opinion of Oracle's stuff comes from my background with SQL Server/ASP.NET, but Oracle is just plain harder to set up and administer and keep running, and that applies not just to the database but also to auxiliary stuff like Oracle Portal, their SOA suite, their Mobility Server etc. Even experienced Oracle people tend to agree with this, so hopefully I won't piss anyone off.
I would definitely not provide support for an Oracle Portal application (or any other Oracle product, for that matter) unless I had a lot of experience with the tools.
I have developed a dozen or so Java portlets for Oracle Portal over the past few years. If you are not necessarily tied into using .NET to develop portlets and do not want to use PL/SQL, I would recommend this approach. Oracle's Portlet Developer Kit (PDK) offers good functionality (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdk.html).
I've not tried the WSRP approach but have deployed ASP.NET apps using the Web Clipping Portlet that comes with Oracle Portal with some success.
I have found Portal to be difficult to work with at times and a good knowledge of the other components in the Application Server stack (OID, SSO, Oracle DB, etc) is very helpful.
I recommend that you take a look at Oracle's WebCenter 11g Suite. When Oracle acquired BEA, it took on a few portal products, but from everything I've heard, WebCenter 11g is Oracle's story as far as portals go for the future - all the active development will be concentrated there. You can find a decent amount of material out there. Here's a blog post to get you started on WebCenter 11g.

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