Best practice

LiveServer Setup Best Practice – How To Tame The OpenText Delivery Server

SEO Tweaks – Some URL Rewriting tricks

Due to the effort of setting up delegation, deciding which HTTP requests should be forwarded to Delivery Server is a simple matter of performing some URL rewrites.
As we have decided to use a mature Web Server, there are best practice ways to achieve this. In IIS6, HeliconTech (Visit HeliconTech website) created a very useful ISAPI filter which ports the widely adopted Apache mod_rewrite (visit Apache mod_rewrite website) functionality. For both of these, the same rewrite rules can be used. The following provides a couple of typical examples:

# Default landing page redirect
RewriteRule ^/$ /cps/rde/xchg/<project>/<xsl_stylesheet>/index.htm [L]
# Rewrite to delegate all *.html or *.htm HTTP requests to Delivery Server
RewriteRule ^/?.*/(.+.html?)$ /cps/rde/xchg/<project>/<xsl_stylesheet>/$1 [L]
# Rewrite to delegate all *.xml HTTP requests to Delivery Server
RewriteRule ^/?.*/(.+.xml)$ /cps/rde/xchg/<project>/<xsl_stylesheet>/$1 [L]

Those of you who are well versed in regular expressions will see that the last two rules could be combined but I tend to leave them separate to aid readability.

SEO & mapping subdirectories in LiveServer

The beauty of using regular expressions in this way is that you can actually create useful SEO benefits to your site also. Take for example the following rule:

RewriteRule ^/?.*/([0-9a-zA-Z_]+)$ /cps/rde/xchg/<project>/<xsl_stylesheet>/$1.htm [L]
This rule maps an URL with many apparent subdirectories to the Delivery Server file.

This means that you can publish a page with a “virtual” path within the Management Server which appears to a browser (and search engines) as something like the following:

http://<host>/this/is/a/descriptive/directory/structure/page.htm
and yet this maps to:
/cps/rde/xchg/<project>/<xsl_stylesheet>/page.htm

Some restrictions & tricks for IIS7
Being a Microsoft product, IIS7 has some quirks with regards to the rewriting (of course), which I explained in a previous post here.

Summary

Sharing the required tasks between their appropriate applications gives you a more stable and reliable system with an even better performance. All you have to do is let:

• Never use the Open Text Delivery Server/RedDot LiveServer as standalone web server on tomcat
• Any Web Server (i.e. Microsoft IIS or Apache HTTP Server) to answer all requests and then return static content(Use IIS or Apache or any other web server to deliver static pages) or if required forward to
• Delivery Server for dynamic requests and the personalization bits (Use LiveServer as personalization engine)

This approach has led to many successful installations where sites could additionally be optimised for SEO and page load by using compression techniques and the way a web server actually serves HTTP requests.

About the Author

This article is based on the blog post here of Danny Baggs. Danny has a strong developer based background and is working for Open Text.

Questions & More information about the named components

Although this should give you a fair bit of guidance on how to set up your web server environments to get a high performance solution there are always questions remaining. Feel free to share those questions in the comments below and let us know what you think.

Read more about the components

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet
• How Servlet Container work
• How to run Tomcat behind IIS7

Questions

• How do you handle forms in a project, should they be based on LiveServer Dynament code or run in the web server?
• How do you manage to keep static delivered content index- and searchable by Verity or another search engine on this system?

Hey Mr. and Mrs. Reader! What are your questions?

Related posts:

1. RQL development with OpenText Web Site Management Server 11
2. Clear OpenText Web Site Management CMS Cache
3. OpenText Content World 2011 – Have you registered yet?

About the author:

Markus Giesen is a Solutions Architect and RedDot CMS Consultant, formerly based in Germany. Travelling around the world to find and offer solutions for a better world (in a very web based meaning). He just found a way to do this as part of a Melbourne based online consultant house. On this blog Markus shares his personal (not his employers) thoughts and opinions on CMS and web development. In his spare time you will find him reading, snowboarding or travelling. Also, you should follow him on Twitter!

Tags: Apache, Best practice, Delivery Server, Helicon, IIS, LiveServer, Performance, SEO, Tomcat, URL Rewriting