Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

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...