what does liveserver actually do

[gk]

Hi everyone,

We've been using the RedDot CMS V9 for 12 months now but we had a
limited budget at the time we bought it and so we don't have
Liveserver - in fact Liveserver was never even mentioned by our
supplier. I'm just wondering if someone can tell me what Liveserver
actually does and whether it's worth thinking about adding it to our
setup?

Also, a very rough idea of the cost would be appreciated as I don't
want to initiate any sales discussions until I know whether it might
be totally out of our price range.

[bobbykjack]

LiveServer is a content delivery application, which offers some of the
scripting capabilities of a language such as PHP. It also provides
some of the features that a web server offers.

Our use of it is very minimal (and I've always been tempted to remove
it from our 'stack') - almost entirely restricted to internal search.
However, the results we've seen from that search function are less
than perfect, to say the least. It's also difficult (if not
impossible) to combine LiveServer and PHP, so if you have a page that
needs to contain PHP script, it has to bypass LiveServer.

My big beef with LiveServer is that it's yet another language to learn
(one which only a tiny number of people will ever know, compared to
something like PHP) and it's nowhere near as flexible as a 'normal'
scripting language.

Having said that, I've recently identified another potential use which
I'm just about to post about ...

- Bobby

[TonyGayter]

My advise is to not use it. We have used it once and regret it. Its a
pain to learn and use. As far as I remember its around 25k which is
far to much. My advise would be to just integrate .net into the site
and use a google box for the search, only a couple of grand then. Far
cheaper and a better alternative. (.Net also works wihtin smartedit if
done properly which live server doesnt.)

> > be totally out of our price range.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand]

I'm not pro-LiveServer or anything. So I am not advising anyone to buy LiveServer but for poeple who have bought LiveServer, I see many pluses to use it.

 

LiveServer is mainly designed as an XML based content engine. If you happen to have structured an XML project variant in your RedDot CMS, it is breeze to let LiveServer digest your CMS-generated content and deliver them personalized.

 

The other benefit of LiveServer is the embedded Verity search engine. It is an OEM version but nonetheless commercial grade. It completes the neat coupling of CMS and personalized content delivery as all XML tags can be interpreted as database field and explicit or implicit search can be conducted using SQL syntax.

 

And the LDAP connector allows you to use your AD or other LDAP to manage site user base and implement SSO fairly reliably and easily.

 

I am well aware of the hostility toward LiveServer in the RedDot community. But I have done projects whereby LiveServer was designed to deliver targeted content to a .NET application, and LiveServer was designed to ingest content generated from Drupal; I've also done projects whereby LiveServer has to intereact with ConstantContact API and one whereby LiveServer has to deliver product search result en masse (and the caching mechanism of LiveServer proved to be robust enough).

 

The biggest, yet a bit intagible benefit of LiveServer is that the task of content "organization" can be delegated to LiveServer instead of fighting the uphill battle inside RedDot CMS. Many hot topics on this board, such as pagination, show and hide ans etc can be implemented in LiveServer with a fraction of the effort you'd put when doing it inside CMS. I always tell my client, "CMS is a workshop, treat it as a laundry chute and let LiveServer handle the presentation logic on the live site."

 

So I really have nothing to hate about LiveServer except when a customer wants to build a social community out of LiveServer. That is the moment I absolutely jump out of LiveServer. The so-called LiveServer WebComponents cutely named as Wiki, Forum and etc are just no more than a joke.

 

And I think OpenText is admitting it now bacuase it is shipping Vignette components to customers who have bought those WebComponents now.

 

So my conclusion? YMMV. If you are humble enough to go through the documentation, you will learn to set up a LiveServer installation and find most built-in features handy and easy. If you expect to use LiveServer's proprietary Dynament API in the same fashion you have learnt and are using as .NET, PHP or Java, you will hate LiveServer immediately.

Henry Lu, a.k.a., Javahand

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[TonyGayter]

All of that can be done using .net at a fraction of the cost/time and
with a wealth of .net developers & resources at the ready, liveserver
is very specialised and has a limited number of people willing to
program against it (props to you henry for doing so).

We found that the google mini box was far more powerful and
configuable than verity aswell.




On Jun 9, 3:53 pm, "Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand" <javah...@gmail.com>
wrote:

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> > .

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[bobbykjack]

I don't know whether it's down to a) how our search was initially set
up b) my own inability to fix it or c) inherent flaws with the
LiveServer / verity integration, but we've had the following problems:

1. The search in LiveServer quickly exposes lots of duplicate content
you'll probably be publishing due to target containers, different
publishing packages on references/links, etc. And content always seems
to hang around in LiveServer FAR longer than you'd like.

2. Problems with content-encoding - our search results contain the
classic 'broken character' glyph all over the place. There seems to be
no good solution to this.

3. The 'context' presented alongside search results is a complete joke

If I had my way, I'd just point our search form to POST to google and
be done with it ...

- Bobby

On Jun 9, 3:53 pm, "Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand" <javah...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > reddot-cms-use...@googlegroups.com<reddot-cms-users%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

[Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand]

Don't know the circumstances on #1 so cannot really comment.

 

On #2, I've come across with at least two client who had LiveServer set up before I cam eonboard and had their LiveServer http encoding set as "guess" instead of specific such as utf-8. That config takes care of the character encoding. It has at least worked for me.

 

#3 -- I wonder if yours is a "zone" issue. If a file bearing xml extension is published into LiveServer, all tags are indexed by Verity as zones and therefore granularly searchable and can be brought up in search via the context tag inclusion. With html files, only a few (such as "title") tags can be indexed as zones. Just a thought.

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[Eric Koleda]

I worked as a LiveServer specialist for three years at RedDot, so I
think I can bring a unique point of view. The application was
originally started as a complete rewrite of CMS in Java, but got
scrapped along the way. In order to save the investment they instead
converted it to a "personalization engine".

In my opinion LiveServer is kind of like a web application platform.
It takes a lot of things that are possible to build on your own and
tries to make them easy. It tries to replace coding with dialogs. It
tries to make it so non-technical people can add dynamic features to
their website.

In many respects it fails at this. Learning the custom DynaMent
language takes time, and few developers have the skill. It was never
made easy enough that a non-developer could build the functionality,
and any good developer would prefer build to build it themselves. I
think that the connectors, when they work, cut out a lot of the nitty
gritty of dealing with LDAP, search, etc, but I don't know if they are
worth the money and the support contract.

If you have talented developers at your organization don't get
LiveServer. If you don't have talented developers, hire them :-)

- Eric

On Jun 9, 12:10 pm, "Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand" <javah...@gmail.com>
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[Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand]

That's pretty emational stuff Eric. Thanks for the background information.

 

I agree with the assessment that LiveServer is not for the non-coder to use.

 

Do you have an opinion on the WebComponents stuff? Compared to today's commercial grade social media platform (Jive, Lithuam, Onsite, Telligent and etc.) what was shipped with LiveServer to handle social media is truly "hello world" grade.

 

I was attacked by certain people within RedDot as "not knowing how to use it." But I stuck with my opinion and challenged my criticizers to cite ONE example of a RedDot-managed site that uses the WebComponents stuff to generate wiki, forum, comments etc.

 

Just give me one example. At least I have not found one and nobody has given me one, albeit many a license have been sold to many clients.

 

I know the point is kind of moot now as OpenText is swapping the stuff with Vignette components, but I am curious if I am really alone in my opinion on the WebComponent stuff.

Henry

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[Christian Burne]

A couple things from my perspective.  We (www.oshyn.com) have been implementing sites w/ OTWS MS and LiveServer/Delivery Server for about 3-4 years and have found it to be a decent platform.  It's a java app so it requires love and tuning to make it work well, but that's the same with any java app.  If you want to do content personalization and/or secuirty of content from OT CMS, it works well enough. 

 

What we tell our customers is:  If you need to do custom functionality on your external site, you need SOME platform to do it.  If you have existing .NET/PHP/Java components or people that you want to use, it's fine to publish from OTWS MS into those apps.  If you have nothing and you need something, DS will do just fine.  If you have personalization and content security requirements on OTWS MS content, that also pushes you back to using Delivery Server and taking advantage of pre-existing components using the connectors (typically web services work fine).  It typically is more work to build content security and content personalization of OTWS MS content in PHP/.NET/Java than it is to just use DS.  It's really a question of where the balance of your requirements lie in order to determine the right decision for you.

 

I also agree with some other posts that Verity search results can be somewhat disappointing and at the very least, tuning serach results are more manageable from GSA or google mini and will yeild better site search results overall than verity.  However many times, we've implemented BOTH:  used GSA for site search, but used Verity for personalization and security.  There are also some other performance advantages to using this combined type of architecture, but it's more stuff to maintain.

 

Dynamenst aren't really that hard to learn and they are tuned specifically for OT content and personalization of that content.  The problem is, it IS another language one must learn (and it doesn't really help anyone on their resume).   I don't really know why they chose this instead of using something standard.  They do have basic programming constructs like:  if/else, looping, setting/retrieving variables, calling external database or web services.  These are the basics you tend to need when building a content driven website.  If you need to do anything that can't be done in Dynaments, you can easily drop down to Java and do whatever you need to do there.

 

Web Components is fairly useless as an architecture, however, the components that they've created are super basic and can/do work.  I've talked about implementing them a number of times w/ clients but never have b/c of the feature requirements.  We have them in our lab environment so we know they work.  If you need anything sophisticated out of Forums/Blogs/Calendars/Comments, etc., then you won't find them in those components.  HOWEVER, if you need the content in them personalized or secure, it's much easier to do by using the Web Components instead of integrating a 3rd party system.  Also, i've got a number of customers who don't have immediate needs and are therefore waiting to see what crossover will come form the Vignette Social Media tools.  I haven't seen them, but my guess is that we'll have to wait to version 1.5 (instead of the initial release) before it's worth implementing the "integrated" vignette social media tools and we have no idea when they will release them.  That usually leaves customers who have an immediate need with trying the current DS Web Components or lookign for a 3rd party or hosted solution and integrating it (and losing searchability and personalizatoin of that content or doing work to integrate)

 

In terms of cost of DS server, I can't give any type of official response (* disclaimer *).  I also don't know if it's changed recently or if OT has changed it since the acquisition and of course, it changes depending on your size, number you are purchasing and overall negotiating prowess.  However, a server licenses for DS used to be slightly less than a server license for CMS/MS (probably about 80-90%).

 

I'd be happy to answer any specific questions at my email address:  cbu...@oshyn.com .    We also have a bunch of blog posts on OTWS DS and the different stuff you can do with it on this blog (feel free to scroll past the marketing stuff :) ):  http://www.oshyn.com/_blog/Web_Content_Management/category/OpenText/

 

Thanks.

 

[Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand]

Do you happen to know ONE example of WebComponent implementation on a active public site?

 

And I am glad you said they were useless.

 

Henry

[Christian Burne]

I do not know of any, but then again, I only know of our customers.  I haven’t asked OT for this information, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they couldn’t come up with any that have implemented it either.  It was fairly half baked since they released it.

 

 

From: red...@oshyn.com [mailto:red...@oshyn.com] On Behalf Of Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 11:34 AM
To: Christian Burne
Subject: [reddot] what does liveserver actually do

 

Do you happen to know ONE example of WebComponent implementation on a active public site?

 

And I am glad you said they were useless.

 

Henry

[Danny Baggs]

Hi all,

To introduce myself, I am a Solutions Architect at Open Text and joined 4 years ago when the company was RedDot.

I would say that there is a fair amount constructive critique in this thread, which I tend to agree with to some extent as I spent significant time within the professional services teams within the UK and then Germany and so I have been close to a number of project implementations over a few years.  More recently, I've worked with the RedDot product set on internal projects. 

Therefore, I think it is important to point out some things that example where we as an organisation are listening to this critique and are applying changes to acknowledge where they're needed.

When I worked in professional services, I always positioned the strengths of LiveServer (now Delivery Server) as being a product that is strong in simple personalisation and intregration.  This meant that it has played a key role in many websites in combination with other offerings.  For example, I have always deployed the product sitting behind a front controller web server such as Microsoft's IIS and Apache's HTTP Server, allowing for best-practice delivery of static content such as images, javascript, and css alongside the dynamic delivery from Delivery Server as such widely adopted web servers have built in ways that static content delivery can be optimised e.g. setting Expires HTTP headers to optimise browser caching.  If you wanted to find out more on this subject, I wrote a blog article on this here: http://bit.ly/ad3oai.

Delivery Server is by design built to work very well with XML based technologies and uses open and easy to use standards like XSLT to allow for delivering the right content.  Although the XSLT is used specifically in Delivery Server, I've always advised to keep it as content classes within the Management Server for the benefit of being able to allow business users to influence the underlying parameters through standard Management Server placeholders and not being exposed to the technical language underneath.

I would however agree with the sentiment here that the XML based DynaMent language (the programmatic server side scripting language) has a learning curve associated and can appreciate the challenge with that.  However, on the positive side, it does encapsulate behaviour/feature well into blocks of embeddable XML.  Given this, we acknowledge this and are now focusing more and more on how such programmatic logic can be abstracted further into standard Management Server templates with standard placeholders influencing the various parameters.  This means that we are moving to a model where business users are empowered to influence behaviour on their sites in much the same way as the Management Server has empowered the same business users to own and manage the content.  This is being facilitated by additional Management Server features such as the drag and drop of content classes into container elements within SmartEdit and only the relevant parameters being exposed via placeholders providing that business user control.  For example, I have used the Web Services connector to good effect in this way when integrating with the Salesforce Web Service API allowing the input of a given Campaign ID parameter to be the only thing permeated up to the Business/SmartEdit user through standard templating.

This supply of pre-made Management Server templates encapsulating DynaMent logic is something we are very keen to grow and certainly would like to encourage contributions from the broader community.  To that end, we've been working on a platform that helps the broader community and this can be seen at http://beta.solutionexchange.info.  This is by no means the finished thing as this is still on non-optimal hardware but we are keen to already listen to you in the community and work with you to provide things of value and to also provide a constructive collaborative voice for the things that you would like to see in the products.  

Whilst talking about the community, it is worth mentioning a few words around 'Web Components'.  Through the aquisition of Vignette last summer, Open Text has inherited a mature product, which has strengths in its social features.  The product now to be called Open Text Social Communities exposes a REST based XML API through which blog, wiki, forum, tagging, review, rating, and commenting functionality can be obtained to name but a few things.  As alluded to earlier, Delivery Server works very well with XML technologies and this is exactly the approach I've taken when building out the community to its current (incomplete) form with many of these features being planned for the future as we iterate and evolve the platform.  I've again chosen to implement the approach mentioned above where by the commenting, rating, and tagging type functionality is encapsulated within Management Server templates.

To take one final example from this context, the twitter feed (using Twitter's REST based XML API) is encapsulated in much the same way, with the caching time (a technical parameter for how often the twitter feed should refresh) being exposed as the following question in SmartEdit for that area: "After how many minutes, should the community tweets be refreshed?".  Again, abstracting in this way allows us to once again focus on serving the business user, which is something I accept we may have lost a little sight on previously but are keen to correct.

I would always welcome further discussions and feedback to help improve our products so grab me at the user group in the UK on June 30th or head over to http://beta.solutionexchange.info and register to help your voice be heard within the right audience and help us evolve something that meets your needs.  I tend to pick up the phone to all who register to talk through where we are at with the community at this point in time and what we're after in beta testers/users.

Kind regards,

Dan

[Eric Koleda]

HI All,

Just to be clear, my previous comments are my own opinions only and am
I not speaking on behalf of Open Text.

To Dan's points, LiveServer is very good at working with XML content,
and it was great for manipulating RSS feeds, etc. If you are a
superstar with XSLT then you'll have a lot of fun in LiveServer. I'm
glad to hear that there is tighter integration starting between CMS
templates and LiveServer logic, as this piece was missing earlier on.

Something I realized after working with LiveServer for a while is that
it bears a strong resemblance to ColdFusion, and many of the same pros/
cons exist between these two platforms. This type of platform isn't
right for everyone, but it does have benefits in certain
organizations.

As for web components, they had just came out as I was leaving the
company, so I didn't have much experience with them, and I haven't
followed their development since then.

Best,
- Eric

> athttp://beta.solutionexchange.info.  This is by no means the finished

> products so grab me at the user group in the UK on June 30th or head over tohttp://beta.solutionexchange.infoand register to help your voice be heard

> within the right audience and help us evolve something that meets your
> needs.  I tend to pick up the phone to all who register to talk through
> where we are at with the community at this point in time and what we're
> after in beta testers/users.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Dan
>
> On 9 June 2010 22:28, Christian Burne <cbu...@oshyn.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> >  I do not know of any, but then again, I only know of our customers.  I
> > haven’t asked OT for this information, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they
> > couldn’t come up with any that have implemented it either.  It was fairly
> > half baked since they released it.
>

> > *From:* red...@oshyn.com [mailto:red...@oshyn.com] *On Behalf Of *Henry Lu
> > a.k.a. Javahand
> > *Sent:* Wednesday, June 09, 2010 11:34 AM
> > *To:* Christian Burne
>
> > *Subject:* [reddot] what does liveserver actually do

> ...
>
> read more »

[bobbykjack]

Hi Henry,

#2 Can you tell me where this is configured? Thanks.

#3 We are just using HTML, so this is no doubt the problem.

- Bobby

On Jun 9, 5:10 pm, "Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand" <javah...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > <reddot-cms-users%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com<reddot-cms-users%252Buns...@googlegroups.com>

[Eric Koleda]

Hi Bobby,

#2) startup.conf or "Administer RedDot LiveServer -> Configuration ->
Administer System Configuration", depending on your version.

#3) You may want to consider using the metainfo VDKPBSUMMARY instead
of the context element, as it can often deliver better results. That
field doesn't support highlighting, but it is possible to emulate it
with XSLT.

Best,
- Eric

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[Henry Lu a.k.a. Javahand]

Bobby--

Glad you asked.

#2 LS is just a Java app so things are controlled in config files. under /cps/web-inf/etc you will find the startup.conf and you need to change this line to a specific encoding (such as utf-8):

reddot.encoding.default = ?

After that, since LS is just a repository sucking content from RedDot CMS or other sources (from Drupal, or a .net app), you need to tell LS to interpret file import based your encoding setting:

Change:

reddot.decoding.httpReqParams.method.get=none

reddot.decoding.httpReqParams.method.post=none

To:

reddot.decoding.httpReqParams.method.get=guess

reddot.decoding.httpReqParams.method.post=guess

#3. It is not hard to bring anything you want in the html file into the context return. For example, if "bobbykjack " is  a piece of metadata you want to bring in context return as a separate tag, all you need to do is insert the following cheat somewhere in your CMS page template:

<span style="display:none;"><my-context-tag>bobbykjack</my-context-tag></span>

Specify my-context-tag in your context include and LS will return "bobbykjack" in context, provided that your Verity is working.

Understandably, "bobbykjack " can be a placeholder in your CMS template so this provides a way for you to construct your search as granular as you want.

Of course, the more graceful way to go about it is to have a xml variant for your pages so that Verity search can be granular and using SQL logical syntax.

Cheers,

Henry

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[Manuel Schnitger (OpenText)]

This article could give you a rough idea what the Delivery Server does: http://manuelschnitger.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/people-content/