There is an increasing need in my project to find out whether few of the portlets are available.
Background:
A portal page comprising of portlets. Some portlets get information from different sites(third party service providers) on the Internet. Portal server is Tibco on Weblogic.
Problem:
Most of the times when any one of these third party content providers are "down" or not accessible (network outage etc), then these portlets are shown as blank as there is no content. Portal clients are unhappy and raise tickets. So I want to develop a proactive PING Service which pings these third party services and alert the system admins asap, so that such issues can be resolved earliest.
Solution:
Most portlets get content by invoking third party Webservices, and some simple http calls.
I'm planning to use Apache HTTPComponents httpcore and develop some
Java programs and schedule using cron.
Is there any better alternative option / opensource tools available ?