GST Site Foundation Overview

The GST Site Foundation accomplishes the following:

  1. Defines architectural and design standards for the foundation of a site
  2. Standardizes processes for business users
  3. Simplifies coding greatly, to the point where much can be provided in common libraries
  4. Clearly defines extension points

The GST Site Foundation Document defines a simple URL-management and request handling/request dispatching model that Content Server architects can easily extend and build upon. The initial emphasis is on a non-rendering foundation that at a high-level provides the following primary benefits:

  • Is suitable for use "out of the box" for a large number of sites
  • Introduces the notion of a web-referenceable asset, which is accessed via a common controller
  • Handles and dispatches requests quickly and efficiently
  • Supports easily-constructed vanity URLs for any web-referenceable asset
  • Standardizes usage of the Page asset for navigation
  • Standardizes meta attributes
  • Provides infrastructure for built-in 404 responses for assets as required
  • Provides for managed alias assets that can represent any other URL
  • Can be cleanly extended to address custom client requirements

Additionally, this foundation addresses problems that many sites face: addressability of assets by editors, and acknowledgement that the URL is more important than the content. By giving each asset its own URL at the discretion of the editor, both problems are solved.

This model is appropriate for many different solution designs. However there may be some site requirements which would make the patterns and conventions of this approach less suitable. A checklist is included that helps an architect to determine if this rendering model is the best approach for the project at hand.

The Global Site Foundation is initiated in 2010 by Tony Field, Dolf Dijkstra, Michael Sullivan and Suzanne Bourdeaux.

Developers and Architects are encouraged to build upon and extend this framework with the long-term goal of folding in such enhancements into future versions of the GST Site Foundation.

August, 2011, The Global Solutions Team

Support

The Global Site Foundation is supported by the community. Questions and remarks can be send to ips-link@yahoogroups.com.

Oracle Support Services does not provide support on GSF. You cannot contact Oracle Support on issues or questions related or caused by GSF, and expect to get an answer. Support can be obtained through the community.

Documentation

Download

The GSF is packaged into a single, downloadable bundle.

Installation

Installing the GSF is simple, but affects multiple components. The minimalistic guide should get you up and running quickly.

More detailed information can be found in the somewhat outdated GSF Developer's Guide.

Building

The source components must be downloaded using Git.

  • Source repository https://github.com/dolfdijkstra/gst-foundation
  • Maven version 2.2.1 should be used to build the GSF. Earlier and later versions of maven might not work (YMMV).
  • Before building the Content Server jars files must be addedd to your local maven repository with the windows or UNIX script.

    This script is best executed from the Content Server WEB-INF/lib directory.

    At the top of the script is a version number stated, you will need to provide the correct version number of the version of Content Server in the WEB-INF/lib directory.

    You will need to compare this to the version number in the gsf-cs-all.pom file: <fatwire.contentserver.version>11.0.0.6.0</fatwire.contentserver.version>.

    If the version number do no match you can build by providing the version number on the command-line:

    mvn install -Dfatwire.contentserver.version=11.0.0.6.0.

  • Execute mvn install to build the jars and install them in your local repository.
  • Execute mvn site:stage to build the site documenation. The site is generated in the target/site directory.