Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

Struts is already the most popular web application development framework and there are tons of applications around, built on top of it. Introduction of portlet as a new web development mechanism has created porting challenge for existing applications. Not all applications are easy to port to portlet framework. But most of the popular framework especially Struts has many bridges already developed to instantly port existing Struts applications to portlet framework. Framework bridges are portal server dependant but nearly all portals now have bridge for Struts. Following article by Masoud Omidvar is good starting article, if you want to port your existing web applications built using Struts to eXo Portal. Here is the link - http://exo-struts.blogspot.com/ Omidvar, hope to see more posts on your blog in future.

In WebSphere Portal, user object provides some LDAP information of the user. But the user object doesn't provide all the information available in the directory. In case, you want to fetch that missing information from LDAP directory, there are some tweaking you will have to do. Here is the article that can help in achieving that.

Enterprise Portal Market Research - Part I I am out of it for quite a while now. I was busy in doing some market research pertaining to enterprise portals. So in last few days, I found some interesting facts, and probably that will be the basis of my upcoming posts. I started with identifying contemporary portal trends. I found following trends in portal marketplace - Convergence of portals from aggregators to integrators Smart Applications suites vendors and Applications platform suites vendors competing for market share Adoption of Portal-related standards among vendors offering interoperability Emergence of open source portals as strong contenders Adoption of the portal as a core-computing platform Aperture of portlet Marketplace I am sure few portal experts will be reading this entry too. So I'll be more than happy by getting their opinion.

It is often asked in our WSRP discussion forum , how to implement WSRP consumer or producer. WSRP specifications are new and there are not many resources available. WSRP specifications are there but are too complicated to be used as base document for WSRP implementation. Also no technical details and 'how to' instructions are available inside the specifications. Another solution is to check the WSRP primer by OASIS available at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/9002/wsrp-primer-1.0-draft-0.9.pdf . Though it is in the draft stage, still it can be more useful than the specifications. The best solution right now seems to read existing implementations. For java, there is already good implementation available in the form of WSRP4J . One can download the source from CVS and study the code. It can definitely help in implementing WSRP in your product. Open source portals i.e. eXo, uPortal and Gluecode have also implemented WSRP. But most of them have used WSRP4J as

There are only few tools in the market for visual portlets creation. I mentioned in my previous article that this market is hotting-up. There seems good market growth for this segment this year. Seeing the potential of this market, I am sure that we will see some concrete data from Forrester and other research firms. Yesterday only, Clickmarks has announced it?s tie-up with Sun Microsystems. IBM has already collaboration with Bowstreet, a similar product company (Incidentally the name of both the products are Portlet Factory). I believe that after seeing the successful partnership between IBM and Bowstreet, Sun/Clickmarks didn't have any option. Few days back I heard a rumor that Clickmarks is going to shut it operations but it is a good sign of it's revival. Let us see what will be the end-result of this partnership. You can also check the press release here . After this partnership, I see one to one competition for the market share. It would be great to see who is going