Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

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).