Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

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...