You can personalize specific content spots of your intranet
and internet website. For example, you can personalize a list of new
articles that appears on the website based on the visitors geographical
location. You can personalize employee bulletins for specific groups
of employees, such as changes to benefit plans. You can personalize
a product list on a commerce website.
When selecting the content to personalize, you must consider the
associations between the content and visitors. For an intranet site,
you may have some articles that are intended for a specific group
of employees, such as managers. Effective personalization is based
on defining what content you want to be seen by each type of visitor.
After you determine what to personalize, your web developer must
create a set of resource collections and application
objects. The resource collection and application objects form
the business vocabulary. Personalization uses the business
vocabulary to make decisions.
- Resource collections
- A Java class that represents and allows access to a collection
of resource instances. It is similar to a database table with a fixed
schema and a number of rows. Resource collection classes must implement
the com.ibm.websphere.personalization.resources.ResourceDomain3 interface.
Rational Application Developer provides a wizard that can create resource
collections that store data in SQL databases or LDAP repositories.
- Application objects
- An application object is a Java object existing at a known location
in the request context. To define an application object specify the
class name and a key to find the class. Personalization calls methods
on these objects during rule execution and uses their results in its
decision making. Application Objects that implement the SelfInitializingApplicationObject
interface are automatically instantiated as needed by Personalization.
The web developer has two options for developing the objects.
- IBM® Rational® Application
Developer includes
personalization wizards.
- There is a set of public programming interface for Personalization.
The web developer must also register the
resource collections and
application
objects with the Personalization server. There are two ways
the developer can register them:
- Use the Personalization Browser to import the .hrf file that defines
the resource collection.
- Manually create the references in the Personalization Browser.
