Customize the proxy for the common rendering engine (CRE) component to provide security around HTTP connections between your product and external data. You can configure settings for certain users and target hosts, set timeout values, and disable methods, headers, and cookies.

The common rendering engine (CRE) is a shared component that software programs such as IBM® Connections use to provide support for rendering various widget models, including iWidgets and OpenSocial gadgets.

When troubleshooting issues related to the common rendering engine (CRE), use CRE logging and tracing services to handle messages and debug errors.

Manage widgets in your application for users.

Anytime you bring third-party, or external, content into your deployment, you open security risks. Measures should be take to reduce these risks.

The common rendering engine (CRE) is a shared component that provides the support framework for rendering widgets in software applications. Widget is a collective term that describes both iWidgets and OpenSocial gadgets.

Use these best practices, tips, and tricks to help you build better, more useful gadgets in an IBM® Connections environment.

Use the following terms and definitions to understand concepts mentioned in this documentation.

Whenever users can interact with data from third-party applications and external services, security measures should be put in place to prevent unwanted access.

Loose coupling is an architectural approach in which individual components operate independently with little knowledge of other components in the system. In this approach, components are designed to depend on each other minimally and bind those dependencies at runtime, if possible.

Domain locking is a security feature that isolates and protects widgets from third-party sources that might try to cause harm to other widgets, the browser, or your application. Locked domains are essential for products that allow users to add or render widgets from third-party sources.

By default, IBM® Connections uses the gadget administration store and limits the access of gadgets to the OpenSocial container based on feature access and remote procedure call (RPC) arbitration.

h2 Overview of the common rendering engineOverview of the common rendering engine h2 h2 Developing widgetsDeveloping widgetsh2 Best practices for developing widgets in ConnectionsBest practices for developing widgets in Connections IBM Connections support for the ...

You can extend the functionality of the Home page application by adding custom widgets. To make the widgets available for use in the Home page, you need to add the widgets from the Administration view and then enable them for use.

Use the wsadmin utility tool to manage applications such as IBM® Connections. The tool is provided by WebSphere Application Server and allows you to edit configuration properties and run administrative commands.

Open Authorization (OAuth) is an open standards-based security architecture and protocol that authorizes users to share data with third-party applications and other services without sharing passwords. Widgets use OAuth to authorize with the product server.

Use APIs for IBM® Connections people and activity streams to customize how users interact with the activity stream and retrieve data about people.

IBM® Connections supports three major intersecting dimensions of security for gadgets: feature access, page object access, and proxy access.