Are there any Portal products that can generate friendly URLs?

Question

Currently, we are using WebSphere Portal v5.1, and the URLs are about a un-friendly as a URL could get. For example:

http://www.foo.com/wsps/portal/!ml/QjzQ0IhyR0UAkc39Aw!!/delta/base64xml/L3dJ82XzBfQ1A!

I have removed a bunch of the characters, but you get the idea. One of our frustrations is that the URLs often end with punctuation. The users of the portal try to cut/paste from the address bar into emails or word docs, and the trailing exclamation mark does not become part of the generated hyperlink (a feature of Microsoft products, this happens with Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, etc).

As for solutions, we've been advised that the URL mapping feature of WPS does not scale well, and I don't believe that has changed much with the more recent releases.

So, back to the question. Are there other portal products that manage URLs better? or is this simply the nature of the portal beast?

Answer 1

What are your portal requirements?

I'm guessing it needs to be Java orientated and I'm guessing when you say portal you mean JSR-168? Or JSR-286? (WPS 5.1 is 168 + IBM mess, 286 is newer, I think Java5+).

It's also worth mentioning that if you've built an entire set of portlets in WAS 5.1 you may need to check with your developers to make sure you're not using IBM-specific extensions. If you are then you'll need to refactor those out, otherwise you cannot drop them into another Portal implementation.

Answer 2

WebSphere Portal is holding the navigational state in its URLs. Cutting this urls will destroy that information. Since Portal 6.1 there is a way to define a "friendly name"=url for pages which allows to send them around without the risk to get them destroyed by copy&paste actions. WebSphere portal is of course supporting JSR286 portlets since version 6.0 I believe. Unfortunately I have no experience with other portal implementations.

Answer 3

Liferay Portal can generate FriendlyURLs for each portal page that can bookmarded and easily defined by the administrator insite. Unspecified URLs also are not so awful, without special characters