WSRP Part4 - WCM Local Rendering vs WCM Remote Rendering

WCM Local Rendering

WCM Remote Rendering

How to setup

To display web content on a portal that does not have IBM® Web Content Manager installed, you can use the JSR 286 web content viewer and the portal's WSRP support. 

NOTE:

1. Any resources required by the web content viewer, must be available on the remote web content server acting as the WSRP Producer ,
1. resource bundle files,
2. context processor plug-ins,
3. JSP components (Any WCM API code)
4. Personalization Rules,

 When to use this approach:

If the site that has very little web content on its pages and is mainly driven by other applications rendered on the page. For those scenarios it may make sense to manage the WCM environment separate from the portal environment.

Why one would want to have an application being remote (in general , not specific to WCM):

1. off-load CPU intensive applications
2. off-load memory intensive applications
3. provide a sandbox for applications that are not thoroughly tested by IT infrastructure
4. the application is not maintained by IT infrastructure, but another party in the organization or outside the organization
5. a SOA infrastructure that has the applications and its content hosted in different parts of the organization

Limitations when using WSRP with the web content viewer: 

• Because the concept of pages and Web content pages does not exist in WSRP, you cannot use the dynamic link broadcasting feature with web content pages. When specifying how links should be broadcast, do not select Dynamically select a web content page in the Broadcast links to field. Selecting this option has the same effect as broadcasting links to the current page.
• Friendly URL formation using the sitearea is not possible
• WSRP is really a protocol to embed remote running applications and not well suited for rendering complete pages remotely. It therefore has no support for any aggregation concept, like links to other pages or other resources outside of WCM.
• The use of authoring tools components or remote authoring action URLs in your web content is not supported with WSRP.
• All tagging and rating features for web content are not supported with WSRP.
• Personalization elements using selection rules based on the federated documents resource collection cannot be used with WSRP.
• In most cases you also want to have the access control set consistently for the portal pages and the web content, which would require additional work in the remote case. 

WCM and WebSphere Portal getting tightly coupled in future releases (in V8.0 , to allow portal page syndications, projects …etc) and these additional features which likely will only be available in the locale rendering scenario.

Benefits of this approach

This result in lower license costs for WCM, but has other infrastructure costs due to the added complexity of managing the remote scenario and the need for more hardware, as the remote calls add additional overhead. 

Overall Comparison

	WCM Remote Rendering	WCM Local Rendering
WCM Request throughput	Lower volume of requests	Higher volume of requests
Portal Request throughput	Higher volume of requests	Lower volume of requests
Total (WCM and Portal) Request throughput	Higher volume of requests	Lower volume of requests
Cost	Less Web Content Manager licenses required	More Web Content Manager licenses required
Dynamic Linking using Web Content Pages	No	Yes
Mobile Portal Accelerator support	No	Yes
Tagging and Rating support	No	Yes
WCM Authoring Tools (ie. Inline Edit) support	Yes, but requires custom building of inline-edit URLs to redirect back to remote WCM server. See	Yes
WCM Basic Cache Support	No	Yes
WCM Advanced Cache Support	Yes	Yes
Upgrade Web Content Manager independent of WebSphere Portal	Yes	No
WSRP (For rendering content)	Yes	No
Web Content Manager can be placed behind a firewall	Yes, but only when redirection is set up and fully qualified URLs are disabled	No
Web Content Manager CPU activity on delivery portal nodes	Low	High
Complexity of administration	More servers to administer	Less servers to administer
Network traffic	Because the path is longer, the network congestion is higher	Less network activity
System CPU requirement	Less CPU speed required (as you have two servers, one for Portal and another for WCM)	Higher CPU speed required (as you have a single server for both WCM and Portal)
Additional Security configuration required	Yes (for authentication between Portal and WCM server	No
Location and execution of WCM JSP Components	Remote WCM Server	Local WCM Server
Location and execution of PZN Rules	Remote WCM Server	Local WCM Server
Tuning required	Yes	Yes

One line summary: Only use remote rendering after careful consideration of all the limitations and implications, if in doubt use local rendering .

References

1. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/xpDocViewer.xsp?lookupName=IBM+Web+Content+Manager+7+Product+Documentation#action=openDocument&res_title=Performing_remote_rendering_with_WSRP_and_the_JSR_286_web_content_viewer_wcm7&content=pdcontent
2. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/dx/Local_and_remote_rendering_with_Web_Content_Management_7.0
3. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/dx/local-and-remote-rendering-with-web-content-management