[Zope] Portal/Portlets Integration and SSL

[John Wubbel]

I have built a portal using Jetspeed. It is configured on a Linux
platform with Apache, Tomcat running behind the Apache and ZServer for
the Zope. The Apache has been configured to be secure, has its own CA
with the mod_jk connector between Apache and Tomcat. The portal of
course has portlets of various web services and applications. A few
portlets support the presentation of content coming from Zope. We do
this using an IFrame portlet with a short piece of Java code on the
server side to service the portlet. So, when the portlet comes up, it
might contain a couple of hyper-links for the user to click on that will
display a document within the portlet frame. Thus, the embedded links
for the portlet will have a http://www.xyz.net:8000/... pointing to the
location of the document. This all works fine, however now I have 1 or 2
documents that are confidential and must be handled via https://... for
a particular portlet. 

I have been experimenting without much success. The browser of course
will indicate that not all components on the page are secure because of
the fact that the embedded links in the page have http in them. As soon
as I make the change to the https protocol, the links will not resolve.
Do I have to somehow make the ZServer also SSL compliant in some manner
in order for it to figure out what https means. Any help or comments
would be very much appreciated. TIA.

John Wubbel
John Wubbel Consultancy