I had the opportunity to develop a Proof of Concept using WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager for a customer recently in which I’ve been looking to incorporate more client-side capabilities into a WCM-based PoC. Working with the customer and understanding their requirements, I figured there was no better opportunity. In building out the PoC, the only server side requests required are to switch between pages (i.e. WCM site areas) and to create, edit or delete content (using the WCM in-context editing capabilities).

Let me give some brief details on how this was done. The core components that make up the PoC are mostly WCM HTML components used to markup the various sections of the page. Beyond that, it’s basically a single navigator component (for navigating between site areas or pages) and a single (hidden) menu component for getting all of the required content for the selected page or site area. Because of the nature of the application containing mainly client side functionality, the menu component was built to return a JSON object (versus HTML markup) representing all of the content on the page. This JSON object could then be manipulated and used throughout the various capabilities and/or HTML components provided within the application. I’ll also give a shoutout to jQuery, as this opportunity gave me a chance to further dig into the JavaScript library. I was thoroughly impressed by the ease, flexibility and native features it provides, such as drag-and-drop and type-ahead, as well as the number of JavaScript-based libraries the jQuery community has built. I was able to easily incorporate a couple of the jQuery libraries I found in the accompanying demo (i.e. content tiling, customized scrollbars) to provide a better user experience in meeting the customer requirements.

I’ll be posting a demo of the work done during this PoC shorty…