WebSphere Portal - Theming for Performance

Whilst rapping with some of our development gurus who're working on the project on which I'm currently engaged, a discussion around the AJAX Proxy came up, with specific regard to adding rich file types to it.

Specifically, there was a need to add the OFT file type to the proxy's list of accepted file types/extensions.

I'd pointed one of the developers at Sunil Patel's blog, which says: -

The proxy-config.xml file has three main elements

• policy: The policy element defines an access policy for specific URL pattern. Value of the url attribute of proxy element defines what URL pattern this policy is addressing. . In our sample configuration you can make GET and POST request to ibm.com, if you try to make either PUT or DELETE that it will deny access

• actions:Required subelement defines defines the list of HTTP methods that can be used to access resource in the target domain

• headers: Optional element that defines the list of header names that you want the proxy to forward to the target domain. By default it will forward Cache-Control, Pragma, User-Agent, Accept*, and Content*

• cookies: Optional element that defines the list of cookies that you want to forward in the target request. If no cookie names are specified then proxy wont forward any cookies

• mime-types:This element is optional. Use it to specify the list of accepted mime types.If no mime type is specified, the proxy accepts all responses

• user: Optional element that defines the user roles that are allowed to make the request. If you set AllAuthenticatedUsers here then proxy will only allow requests from authenticated users.

I'd also recommend that he talk to Konrad Wulf, who wrote the excellent Troubleshooting the Ajax Proxy in Portal.

In the end, it was also necessary to ensure that the front-end web server, IBM HTTP Server (IHS), also needed to have the OFT MIMEtype configured via the AddType directive.

As a final step, we also looked at Alex Lang's excellent blog here which has a lot of good stuff on portal performance, caching, hosting widgets on IHS rather than on WAS etc.