Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

Recently multiple remote vulnerabilities/ exploits has been reported in Oracle Portal's Discussion Forum Portlet. I am not very sure about the severity of the exploit, but it is always good to play safe. Please check the test page for details.

Portal market consolidation process is still going on. Acquisitions are becoming daily news in portal arena. Seeing the heavily distributed market , big vendors are fighting hard to gain more and more market. This time it is the turn of Bowstreet. So the news is - IBM acquired Bowstreet, Inc. to consolidate itself in portal and collaboration space. Bowstreet's portlet factory was the leading tool for portal based application integration. Application integration is a major challenge in portal implementation. IBM's acquisition of Bowstreet will help IBM in integrating WebSphere Portal with backend applications like PeopleSoft, SAP, and Databases etc. Bowsteet Portlet Factory's collaborative features will also support IBM WorkPlace, which is IBM's visualization of collaborative portal. I am personally not much impressed by Bowsteet Portlet Factory product. It is complex in terms of development, installation, configuration and maintenance (in other words everything). It is ...

Sun Announces Bold New Enhancements to Java Enterprise System and Java System Suites With Breakthrough New Portal Server for Building Web 2.0 Applications and Communities Check complete story here.

Apache recently announced much awaited Jetspeed 2.0. Among other new features, in my opinion, the best feature is the native support for JSR 168 (and no marks ;-) for guessing it). Due to lack of JSR 168 support it fell in few of my evaluations. I hope that open source portals like Liferay and eXo got tougher competitor this time. Though I believe that much more efforts are required on Apache's front to catch leading open source portals. Apache Announces Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal

TIBCO Software Inc. announces the release of Tibco PortalBuilder 5. Other than JSR 168, it also supports WSRP, another key standards for enterprise portals. Seeing TIBCO's strengh's of enterprise application integration, it is going to a good addition in portal server market. Please check the complete story here.

IBM has submitted JSR 286 - Portlet Specification 2.0 to the JCP for an initial review. "This JSR requests the creation of the next version of the Portlet Specification. The main goal of this version is to align the Java Portlet Specification with J2EE 1.4, other JSRs relevant for portlet programming, like JSR 188 , the next version of Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)" Portlets community was a bit worried for the next version of JSR 168 specification. I am sure that everybody will be happy reading this. More details can be found here.

Got a change to go through Forrester’s article " Say Goodbye To Portal Servers ." Here is the summary of report - Vendors like Plumtree Software and Epicentric created the portal server market in the late 1990s by offering servers with technical features that just didn't exist within firms' existing IT infrastructure. Now those features — like UI abstraction, integration, workflow, and delegated administration — have been co-opted, improved, and embedded in general-purpose infrastructure platforms from vendors like IBM, BEA Systems, Oracle, and Microsoft. The standalone portal server market is gone, absorbed into infrastructure vendors' app server platforms and emerging interaction platforms. Conclusion looks OK that infrastructure vendors are adding portal features like UI abstraction, integration and workflow in their suite. But I don't think that pure play portals are out. The major missing point in this report is the exclusion of open source portals which ...

I always tried to provide information helpful for portal selection. Here is another useful article in that chain - Liferay Review

Announcing our SyncEx Collaboration Portlets , I quoted that market really lacks useful JSR 168 compliant portlets. Joseph Ottinger wants to verify it on theserverside.com. Post your opinion too - http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=37286

I am proud to announce JSR 168 complaint collaborative portlets for MS Exchange Server on behalf of my company Yash Technologies, Inc. Seeing the dearth of JSR 168 compliant portlets, I hope that our portlets will prove landmark in portal evolution. Here is the press release - Yash Announces SyncEx Collaboration Suite & API for MS Exchange Yash Technologies, Inc. , a leading provider of enterprise portal solutions, announced the release of SyncEx Collaboration Portlets for use by enterprise customers worldwide. The new offering gives Enterprise Portal customers the ability to integrate Microsoft Exchange emails, appointments, contacts, tasks into their portals quickly and easily. The SyncEx Portlets are JSR 168 complaint and can be deployed on any JSR168 portal server. Presently, SyncEx is coming with ready versions that work seamlessly on all popular J2EE portal servers such as IBM WebSphere Portal, BEA Weblogic Portal, eXo Portal and Liferay Enterprise Portal. Yash lab is also t...

Nabh Systems, an India based company, today announced the release of Stringbeans 3.0. This major release introduces Nabh's Web services platform, and support for Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. Full feature set can be found at announcement page on our portlet forum .

JasperSoft builds JBoss reporting portal

I was so tired of spam comments that I was thinking of disabling comments features altogether. Thanks god, Blogger's new Captchas feature (Word Verification System) came to rescue me. Once you enable it, automated comments will not be possible. You can also enable it by changing the comments setting. Get more details here - http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/19/204126.ph

I normally avoid writing anything unrelated here (it is not about portlet and portal) but sometimes you can not control yourself. Yes, it is about AJAX. Today, I have seen this application – meebo and really stunned seeing the power of AJAX. We ourselves are using AJAX in quite a few applications now-a-days, but this application seems special. Meebo has used JavaScript, DOM, DHTML, XML & CSS in really innovative ways. Seeing this application, we can say that AJAX has come a long way and will soon start challenging desktop applications. You can do nearly everything in this web application that you can do in desktop application. It is one of the finest examples I have seen of AJAX. You can also try it and let me know your opinion. Mr. Gates, are you scared?

First impression while reading the news was - what happened to the portal industry. Don't they have any other name to think? There are already two products named 'Clickmarks Portlet Factory' and 'Bowstreet Portlet Factory' and I am also planning to launch a similar named product. But going into details, I found that Oracle has licensed the technology from Bowstreet only :-) Anyways, seems that portlets are picking up as preferred platform for integration. Check the News Here

Lack of good web clippers (aka URL scrappers) in the market obstructs quick portal adoption. Web Clipping is one of the fastest methods for integrating existing applications with the portals. Though nearly all portals come with web clipper tools/ portlets but most of them lack the professional touch. Kapow and Clickmarks are two such companies in the market whose products are quite advanced in comparison to out-of-box web clipping portlets provided with most portals. Yesterday's announcement by Kapow Technology for the release of version 6.0 of "RoboSuite Web Integration platform" will definitely boost this market. Kapow Press Release

Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products

After a long wait, search engine champ finally came up with its own search engine for weblogs (Beware Technorati.com) - Google Blog Search

If you are looking for comparison between two popular portlet API, here are few useful online resources - White paper by Stefan Hepper Article by Stefan Hepper Article on Search Domino In my opinion, white paper is very well written and is the most useful resource. I keep refering this PDF especially whenever I have to code something in IBM Portlet API (a modified version of Apache Jetspeed API).

Microsoft & Interwoven recently announced the integration of Interwoven WorkSite with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Though Microsoft and Interwoven were working together on quite a few other projects, but it is really very interesting news as it will strengthen Microsoft SharePoint Portal with features like Collaborative Document Management whereas it will open altogether new market for Interwoven. It is definitely win-win partnership for both the companies. Me and my company Yash Technologies Inc., being player in both SharePoint portal as well as WorkSite, will definitely take a special note of it. Check the press release from Interwoven

Another day and another acquisition by BEA. The first question that came into my mind is about the future of Plumtree. Whether Plumtree is going to survive or it is the end of it? Different people do have different opinion. You can check few of them at TSS - BEA to Acquire Portal Vendor Plumtree Software Here is another opinion - Another Acquisition At this stage nobody knows the correct answer but here is my 1 cent. I believe that using Plumtree, BEA wants to enter into the market where there is no IBM ghost. Both IBM and BEA are strong infrastructure portal players, but IBM's aggression was leaving very little for BEA. After acquiring Plumtree Software, BEA will have new market as well as some more breathing time. It will also get hold on technologies like portal integration with dot net, collaboration services and content management services where BEA was not much strong till now.

Good to see new codes in the open source library. Concept of Inter-portlet communication is nothing new in JSR 168. But having a ready-made API is a great idea. I have not checked it, but the architecture is matching with the one we are using internally. Here is the URL - Check the library If you check it, don't forget to let me know your opinion.

Switching from one portlet to another results in losing the state of the first portlet. Due to this behavior of portlets, it becomes difficult to use them for rich client applications. Author Marc Domenig suggests half-object + protocol pattern (:-) interesting name) can be useful in such scenarios. Rich-Client Portlets And Half-Object Protocol Design Pattern We have never faced such kind of requirements in our projects so I am not sure in what situation it can be useful. But It will be good to see similar support directly in portal servers. What do you think? Have you faced similar problems in your projects? Note: For those who are not aware of "Half Object plus Protocol (HOPP)" design pattern can have an introduction to it at http://jan.netcomp.monash.edu.au/distjava/hopp/lecture.html

Jing Xue's Weblog is an interesting blog from portals perspective. He is nowadays evaluating various open source portal servers. He has already evaluated JBoss, Liferay, GridSphere, and Jetspeed. I guess the eXo and Stringbeans are in the process of evaluation. Here is what he has to say for various open source portals - JBoss Portal & Liferay GridSphere Jetspeed Open Source Portal Servers and GPL You would have seen few useful posts on the same subject on this blog. These posts in conjunction with Jing Xue’s posts can help you in choosing the right portal. To bring everything on one page, here are the old links – Which Open Source Portal Server to Choose? Choosing an open source portal server Best Open Source Portal Server? [Update - July 23, 2005] Another post on the same topic by Apoorv - http://www.apoorv.info/index.php/2005/07/16/open-source-portals-comparison/

It is hard to get free time. This weekends I decided that I will not even think about my routine work which includes portals and portals and portals. But this idea didn't last long :-). Once I returned back to my laptop, as usual, I started to look around for something new on portals and found some interesting blog posts & websites. I hope these posts will be useful for my readers too so I am posting the links here - If I am not the interviewer, these questions can help - IBM Portlet Programming - Interview Questions Web Services are useful for portals. But how? Check this - Teaming Up Portals and Web Services . It is an old article. I don't know how I missed it. Even I think that AJAX is going to be important for portals. I visualized about a new DOM :-) (check my post on jetspeed mailing list); I guess it is on its way - Microsoft gets hip to AJAX Understand how to do WSRP in a better way - Best Practices for Implementing WSRP Still you have the same question "Why po...

Finally I am able to resolve problem with my blog. Last week was the "HTML broken" week (rather fortnight) for me. The right side layer of this blog is a floating layer and somehow one fine day it stopped showing there and moved to the bottom right part of the long web page. As always with HTML/CSS problems, I had no clue of what happened. I deleted most of the last posts and changed the template but nothing was able to solve the problem. The blog was looking good in Firefox but on IE, everything on the right side was taken to down. On the other had, at my work area I was facing the reverse problem. Some of my portlets were working perfectly fine with IE but not on Mozilla Firefox. This IE/ Firefox issue was killing me. Finally we were able to resolve the problems with our portlets on Firefox with changes here and there. But the problem was still there with my blog. Suddenly the idea struck that probably the last post on the page is creating problem. So I changed the total nu...

Somebody asked me about publicly available WSRP producers for testing his consumer porlets. If you are also looking for some publicly available WSRP producer to check your consumer, here is everything that you want - BEA http://wsrp.bea.com:7001/producer/producer?WSDL Citrix http://andrek.dyndns.org/WSRP%20Portlets/services/andrek.wsdl IBM http://wsrp.dyndns.org:9081/wps/wsdl Oracle http://portalstandards.oracle.com/wsrp/jaxrpc?WSDL Sun http://sunwsrp.dyndns.org/portal/wsrp/wsdl/default Vignette http://wsrpdemo.vignette.com:8080/producer/wsdl WSRP4J http://wsrp.dyndns.org:8080/wsrp/wsdl/wsrp_service.wsdl Note: You can get more WSRP related information from our WSRP Discussion Forum or WSRP Community .

Found a good article on integrating Lotus Domino and Apache Tomcat for achieving Single SignOn (SSO) - Domino and Tomcat SSO The methodology is using LTPA (Lightweight Third-Party Authentication) Token for authentication. LTPA token is IBM's proprietary methodology and hence can be used to integrate IBM products e.g. Lotus Domino only.

Wily Technology today announced general availability of Wily Portal Manager 5.3.2 for IBM WebSphere Portal, supporting IBM WebSphere Portal versions 5.1 or 5.0.2x. Check the press release here.

Google has given me two news today and both of them were related to Portal RAD tools only. The first news was related to one of the biggest news making product on enterprise portal i.e. Bowstreet Portlets Factory. They have joined Bottomline Technologies, an ERP software company for rapidly creating, customizing, maintaining, and deploying Bottomline applications as portlets. Another news was joining of Kapow Technologies and Plumtree Software. As I kept mentioning in the past, Bowstreet, Clickmarks and Kapow are kind of companies which can complement portal companies very well. In the world of outsourcing it is better to let companies work on their competencies and portal vendors are started understanding it. I am sure that we will see more such announcements in future.

I am always a big fan of NetUnity WSRP Toolkit. I am pleased to see that NetUnity Software has announced the latest release of its product. Here is the brief of the release - NetUnity Software today announced the latest release of its product for developing WSRP compliant portal-based business solutions using the Microsoft .NET Framework™. The latest release adds extensive support for ASP.NET™. With this release of the framework, developers can implement WSRP portlets using any number of ASP.NET pages including support for the form designer, postbacks, view state and event handling. Navigate or redirect between an unlimited number of ASP.NET pages within a portlet or re-use the same page in multiple portlets for extremely rich portlet content and interactions. Other new features include Oracle database support, SOAP tracing, advance session management, improved setup and streamlined deployment. Check complete press release here.

With TN5250j, it is possible to easily integrate your host applications into your portal with full single sign-on capabilities. Here is how you can do it - Integrating iSeries Host Applications into Portals

Vignette today announced the new version of its portal. The most important highlight of this release is the adoption of standards JSR 168 & WSRP. Now Vignette can be used to consume external remote portlets for web services. Following are some of the new features - -- Enhanced out-of-the-box search capabilities that allow users to query a wide range of internal and external data sources -- Improved personalization. -- Improved & tightly integrated content management system. -- Integration with Vignette(R) Records and Documents through the use of standards-based JSR-168 portlets. Check press release here.

With the development of JSR 168, we had seen some really beautiful dreams. There will be a world where vendor neutralization will be everywhere. Anyone will be able to take portlets from one portal and will be able to deploy it in another portal. It will be as good as web application porting. And during this beautiful dream, here comes the devil – the spec violation and making so many additions to make interoperability non-interoperable. Why I am talking about my nightmare here. Isn't I am using the Weblogic workshop for a while now? What happened, have they said 'no' to sponsor some of my project? :-) Though we are using the Weblogic workshop for portlet development for quite a while, but I was not directly involved in the development. I mostly use IBM WSAD or Eclipse for JSR 168 portlet development. The real reason behind this sudden agony is that I had to deploy the portlet developed using Weblogic workshop into the WebSphere portal. First and the most interesting one - ...

Today Google informed me the launching of various new portal products. There are two development tools and two products. These are few of the important trends that I thought will be prominent in 2005. It looks coming out to be true. Here are two old posts reminding the same. RAD & Visual Portlet Tools Enterprise Portal Trends And here are the News stories - Clickmarks Teams With Plumtree Software to Deliver Rapid Portlet ... New webMethods Portal Release to Accelerate Composite Application ... Unicon Inc. Releases New Version of Academic and Administrative ... Bowstreet Debuts Workforce Management Suite; Solution Streamlines ... This is not all. Every portal vendor is now trying to consolidate on development tools front. Also not to tell that we will soon see more and more existing applications being Portalized. Uhum ... my astrology is working for enterprise portal market too :-)

Web Services analysts Zapthink (I must confess that I was not aware about any such research agency before finding this article on Internet) predicts that today's web based portals will prove "wholly inadequate" to meet the needs of emerging standards based, loosely coupled, distributed applications. The solution, Zapthink's research says, will come from "rich clients" that will allow portal users to customize their UIs and even their workflow and application access. I have not seen the actual research. I have seen an article that can be found at " Integration Developers News ." On first glance it sounds impressive to me. In fact, in the past even I thought on the same lines and found that existing browsers are too thin to be the pal of portals. But my conclusion was different from Zapthink's. In my opinion with the time and after emergence of portals, the browser will grow a little richer and will be able to understand portals. Even the DOM...

Last time when I made the similar post, we had around 200 votes on the portal poll . Since then, the total number of votes has doubled and we have slightly new equations. Seeing the change, I decided to post it again with the revised tally. Here is the latest tally - Note: Others contain Oracle, Plumtree, Vignette, SAP NetWeaver and MS Sharepoint portals with 5, 4, 5, 1 & 1 percent votes respectively. Here are some quick facts & observations - The total votes were 419 on the day of counting. eXo portal is still leading but with lesser margin this time. It seems that eXo, Liferay and IBM WebSphere Portal are approx. equally popular (at least among the forum members) Another poll in the community shows that around 60% members use open source portals. Open Source portal servers are more popular than their commercial counterparts.

Hello Friends, The time I started weblogs and forums, I had not idea what it can mean to me. Seeing the dearth of resources, it was just to share my knowledge and to learn from others. JSR 168 and WSRP were the new standards and even the basic tutorials, books, reference materials etc. were missing completely. But since then the scene has changed a little, if not a lot. The books have been written, the support of JSR 168 and WSRP has been added in products, and articles have been written. Another surprise for me is the amazing growth of the community (see the side navigation for links) I started that time. For example the community I set up (blogs & groups) has grown to around 5000 members. On Internet and pertaining to a new technology, these are big numbers. Recently we conducted a survey and received around 400 votes. It helped us answering the one most important question pertaining to enterprise portals i.e. "Which is the most used portal server?" The portlet discussi...

eXo Platform SARL (http://www.exoplatform.com/), a privately-held company leading the development and services of the open-source enterprise portal eXo Platform, today announced the availability of the first commercial release of the portal -- giving users a customized single point of access to information systems and resources. Check the press release

At Lotusphere this week, IBM announced the availability of the IBM Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Self-Service Validation Site . IBM built the site to help business partners test and ensure that their WSRP services can easily integrate with IBM's WebSphere Portal. Though Oracle Portal doesn't support WSRP as of now, they have similar validation site called "OracleAS Portal Verification Service" :-). You can validate your remote portlets against OracleAS Portal there. Check the release story at e-Pro Magazine

Today I found an article on CMS Watch titled Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value? . I guess the author missed the bigger picture. The most of the logics do not sound convincing to me. Here are few of my observations - Portals should not be evaluated for immediate benefit rather ROI should be calculated over a span of few years. For example author talks about the cost but he forgot the cost of maintaining 100 or 1000 independent applications written for different framework using different security, collaboration and content management architecture. Portals help in attaining that similarity and hence reduce the maintenance cost manifolds. Also the authors seems evaluating portals from the content management perspective. After all he is writing for CMSWatch. Also he is from content management background. My regular readers can recall I have mentioned the problem of content management in portals few weeks back. But we should remember that portals are not only for content ma...

Collaboration has now become a part of enterprise portals. It is hard to imagine portals without collaborative features. Though the collaboration technologies are the essential part of portals, its maturity seems just tip of the iceberg. Easy integration with portals is missing and generic portlets are not available. Here is the status of few leading portals - IBM WebSphere Portal - The integration is hell lot of time taking and complex, and most of the collaborative portlets are still not native portlets. IBM is one company which is master in making the simple things complicated. BEA Weblogic Portal - Full integration is not available. You can not use most of the collaborative features using the supplied portlets. Oracle AS Portal - Available portlets are terrible. You can not even think of using it. Open Source Portals - I have not heard about any open source portal supporting full range of collaborative features. Also the integration with popular collaborative prod...