Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

I am compiling a list of books available on portlets, java portals, JSR-168 and WSRP technologies. A quick serach given following results. You will find books on IBM WebSphere Portal Server, Oracle Portal Server, BEA Weblogic Portal Server and of course Open Source Portal Servers etc. 1. Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools: Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, Slide by W. Clay Richardson, Donald Avondolio, Joe Vitale, Peter Len, Kevin T. Smith 2. IBM WebSphere Portal Primer by Ashok K. Iyengar, Venkata Gadepalli 3. Web Development with Oracle Portal by Mohamed El-Mallah 4. Mastering IBM WebSphere Portal Server: Expert Guidance to Build & Deploy Portal Applications by Ron Ben-Natan , Ori Sasson , Richard Gornitsky 5. Building Portals with the Java Portlet API By Jeff Linwood, David Minter (Not yet published) 6. Programming Portlets by Ron Lynn 7. Oracle 9iAS Portal Bible by Rick Greenwald, Jim Milbery 8. BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 Kick Start 1 ...

Truly speaking, I don't have much idea on what portal solutions are available on Microsoft platform especially open source ones. Yesterday, while surfing the web , I came to know about some open source portal solutions on Microsoft platform. One was Rainbow and other one was DotNetNuke . It is good to see some open source portal solutions on Dot Net. What made me interested that these too use some sort of portlets. Again as I told you, I don't have much idea of these solutions. But I am interested to know how these are compared with open source java portals?

Please read it in continuation of my old stories on choosing open source java portal server. The one was not based on any extensive study but based more on my past experiences with java open source portals. After that a few things have changed. (yes, and will keep changing:-) ) Probably on the same day of my post, GridSphere released version 2.0 of their portal server. eXo has also came up with RC1 of the their portal server. I have given a quick look to eXo but didn't get sufficient time to go through GridSphere. Meanwhile, Nick also tried to deploy some JSR 168 portlets on different portal servers. But he was not able to deploy it on any of the servers. Primary reason being insufficient documentations. He has chosen GridSphere, Liferay, eXo and uPortal for his experiments. You can read his full post on Java Portal Discussion Forum . Again the study was not comprehensive one but you can say one step ahead in evaluating portal servers. At least you can get some different persp...

I am happy with the way everything going on with me on net. There are various reasons of my happiness - 1. My portlets blog on JRoller was featured on TheServerSide.com . Due to TSS, I received lots of hits. 2. I was awarded "Star Blogger" by ITToolBox . :-) 3. My portlets discussion forum crossed 600 members mark. 4. There are few more but if I'll disclose here, I'll be in a prooblem. ;-) Anyways, so first of all thanks to all readers who are reading my blog regularly (portlet, portlet and portlet :-( uhh). Also thanks to JRoller , ITToolBox , and Blogger for hosting my blogs.

One reader of my weblog asked me to help him with demos of portal servers so that he can play and have some idea about the product before making any decision. I requested the same on my portlet discussion group and few portal vendors responded. Here is the list based on their responses. I am planning to keep it updated. Liferay - http://demo.liferay.net GridSphere - www.gridsphere.org is composed of content portlets developed on top of GridSphere portal framework, but probably one cannot play with the portal. eXo - Similarly, www.exoplatform.com is built on eXo Portal. You can also play with it to some extent. Jahia - http://demo.jahia.org Of course, I am looking for more responses so that I can add them here.

Nowadays my team is evaluating open source portals that have support for workflow management and BPM. Workflow is a technology in demand. Lots of people see it as complementary technology to EAI. But the problem is that each of our clients have different types of need. Commercial portals are quite matured in the case of workflow. But I didn't find extensive workflow support in any open source portal. I did a google search (as always, it thrown my pages back to me :-)) I found only two open source portals in result. One was eXo with some workflow portlets and other one was Jahia (Stéphane, I have included Jahia in open source list this time :-)) with content workflow support. I have yet to see both the products. But I guess there will be some more products that I am missing here. If I am missing some products, please let me know.

Best Open Source Portal Server? I had raised the issue Which Open Source Portal Server to Choose . Jeff replied on his blog in favor of Jetspeed 1. Meanwhile TheServerSide.com also raised the same question referring my blog. So the discussion became interesting. We have seen various responses including responses from nearly all open source portal vendors. As always, it was looking like portal marketplace where everyone trying to promote his portal. So one can ask now, which one you concluded the best? Good question. But if you will see my initial post, you will be able to clarify that I was not trying to find out the best portal server. In fact, it is not possible at all to find the best and come to the consensus. Tell me which is the best Hollywood actress? :-) Anyway, my purpose of that posting was to narrow down the list. For a new person, it is really difficult to choose one portal server out of so many available portal servers. So just to repeat, the objective was to narrow ...

Jeff on his blog, Uncommented Bytes , has shown Jetspeed 1 as his portal of choice. I had not given Jetspeed 1 in my list of choice instead I had given Jetspeed 2 (yet to release) in my list. He was of opinion that Jetspeed 1 and Jahia should be in the list. There are two reasons for not adding these two in the list. Jetspeed 1 is not JSR 168 and WSRP compliant. I had JSR 168 as primary criteria for my list. Without JSR 168 support whatever work you are doing will not be reusable. It is very clear that all vendor dependent API will soon die. There is no use of going for vendor depended APIs. As the Jetspeed 2 will support JSR 168 and WSRP, I had added it in the list though it is yet to be released. There are lots of question marks on Jahia being open source. As Jahia is not open source, I decided to take it off the list.