Header Portlet Presentation using classic ASP in v5.0?

Question

I would like to implement a share price ticker in a header portlet using ASP such as:
<%@ Language=VBScript %><%' URL for the share price Web ServicestrWebServicePath = "http://myWebService.com/fetch.asmx/Summary"
' create DOMDocument and load XMLset xmlDoc = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0")xmlDoc.async = falsexmlDoc.setProperty "ServerHTTPRequest", truexmlDoc.validateOnParse = falsexmlDoc.load strWebServicePath
' fetch all the share price nodesset sharePriceNodes = xmlDoc.selectNodes("//sharePrice")
' store each value client-sidefor each node in sharePriceNodes i = i + 1 response.write "<input type=hidden id=sharePrice" & i & " value=" & node.selectSingleNode("tickerDisplay").Text & " />"next
' clean upset xmlDoc = nothing%>
Am I correct in assuming that I can only use HTML for the header presentation in versions 5 and above? If so, is there a work-around I could use?
Thanks

Answer 1

Richard,
Portlets and UI customizations of the core product are two different things. Headers, footers, and portlets in the mypage or community page are portlets, and as such can be remote, can be just straight HTML, but they have to be served by a remote web server - it's not like you can just plop HTML onto a disk and you're done; the HTML has to be served by IIS, Tomcat, BEA, Websphere, Apache, or an equivalent HTTP web server.
UI customizations are for all the other things you see in the portal: the navigation, the topbar, the editors, utilities, literally everything that is not strictly a portlet. In 4.5, you could customize that UI directly, because it was made up of a set of ASP pages (a full Java equivalent with JSP pages was also available). The drawback was that when we shipped even the tiniest hotfix, you had to merge differences between our new version and yoru customizations. This was clearly inefficient.
In 5.0, UI customizations can be done in layers, using our ActivitySpace architecture. This allows you to override the implementation of specific views, models, and controllers, which means your customizations integrate seamlessly with new updates to the product, as long as the core UI feature you are customizing continues to function as it was designed when you customized it. Customers have adopted 5.0 very rapidly because of this feature. We've also shipped many dozens of new APIs that allow you to respond to and customize a variety of complex events in the portal, when you want to do more than simply change the HTML.
So: Q1 answer: yes, of course you can use HTML. Q2 answer: We no longer use ASP pages in the core portal; we use ActivitySpaces (which contain models, views, and controllers), and HTMLElements, but there are many ways to customize any feature to do what you want using any of our API's.
David Phipps