Let me outline the problem space. I want to create a SEO friendly page that contains dynamic information, but also has areas of information that are easily editable by HTML content editors (NOT programmers) outside of the normal development lifecycle (I'll call this content 'static' content). For example think of a product page that has fluffy content about a product and some pictures on top (the static content) , and then at the bottom real-time dynamic search results from our site for that product (the dynamic content).
Some constraints:
- AJAX is not an option for the dynamic portion (spiders will not get the dynamic content)
- an IFrame is not an option for the dynamic portion (dilutes benefit of SEO)
- the static content should be easily editable at any time by someone outside of development, and the changes should take effect in a timely manner (real time is not necessary, but they should not need to wait until we restart the webapp servers, for example).
- these pages will be hit hard so performance and system impact is a factor (for example going to the database or file system for content on every page hit is not reasonable).
What I am thinking is that the entire page needs to be a standard dynamic servlet, with customized areas of HTML that the content editors can somehow edit. It is this editing aspect that I am looking for suggestions on. I could solve the problem with text files that are available on our NAS in a shared location to both the content editors and the webapp server cluster, and are read in by the webapp servers and cached at page access and pushed to portions of the view layer, but I'm hoping there is something out there that makes this a bit less hackish or at least does some of the plumbing for me that could plug into our view or controller layer.
Of course if there is a way to keep the entire page static, but pull in some dynamic data in a way that spiders will see it as part of the same page, that would be ideal.
Notes on technologies: - we use an open source java stack with Velocity as the view layer to serve our dynamic servlet content - Apache serves all static html pages