Tridion Experience Manager (XPM) implementation

Question

I am trying to understand different artifacts around implementing Tridion XPM. Unfortunately I did not find any article that has answers to my questions.

For example Content delivery server (on WebSphere) can have four different applications, one for Content delivery(which handles publishing), one for web service (oData implementation), one for XPM (with Session preview) and the actual preview application. I am assuming we can merge one or more of these applications into one for a simple implementation (with one or two consuming websites).

My questions are:

1. How can we simplify the number of applications (WARs) to be made? Though I always prefer to keep the preview application separate from Tridion's framework. What are the benefits around Content Delivery session preview Web service as a standalone Java/JSP Web application Versus adding it to existing application?
2. How can I associate/integrate webservice(oData) to XPM or other common basic functionality like component linking?

For example if I publish a page with out enabling oData it will split tridion:ComponentLink tag where as if I enable it will split tcdl:Link tag. So I need to come up with custom class to read these tags? which eventually require adding Tridion framework in the preview application. (Assuming I did not include any Tridion framework in my preview to have a clean application dependency)

I looked at Tridion's live site for more information, but I could not find much useful info for my questions.

Answer 1

There's a LOT of questions right there, let's see what I can do here.

You will need 3 applications:

• A Deployer (standard deployment configuration)
• A Staging Website (with Tridion stack + XPM Filters + Ambient Framework)
• A WebService app (OData + Ambient Framework)

XPM itself runs in the Content Manager Explorer, so it's not per se a separate app, it's an extension of the Tridion Content Manager.

If you want to have your staging separate from Tridion, then you will not be able to use "Session Preview", which in turn means you do not need OData. This however will revert back to the SiteEdit days whereby every change you do to pages requires the page to be republished (with Session Preview this is immediate).

You do NOT need to use OData for your Website in any way (unless you really want to). The WebService is there to support Session Preview only. I wrote down the interactions between XPM/CME/Staging site here and they're documented here.

If you publish tcdl:link code to OData, then just use TCDL/REL, Tridion will render it for you, you don't need to custom parse anything.

Hope this helps...