Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

Recently, we saw the announcements of ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet. Both of these seem like somewhat useless products and don't appear to add much on top of a standard Chrome browser. However, I believe that these "agentic browsers" are going to have huge impact. Why? The biggest problem with current AI agents is that they cannot see what we see. They cannot consume what we consume, so they cannot act the way we act. We live much of our lives digitally and online, but our agents do not. If I were able to give my agent access to my Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, email, calendar, etc., it would start to think more and more like me. Since the browser already has access to all of this, it is the key component required. There are one or two more features that would be required to make a big impact.  First, we would need the ability to schedule tasks. This way, my agent could be like me, checking WhatsApp, email, and YouTube periodically. Second, like Cursor and Claude Cod...

Recently I saw a message in Firebase Console to upgrade my Firebase property to Google Analytics property. Such properties are called Google Analytics App + Web properties in GA after upgrade. The primary benefit for upgrading the property that I see is that we can see all Firebase Analytics data in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool that we all have used for years and it is slightly easier for me. I am also more comfortable doing analysis using Google Analytics than Firebase Analytics. On top of that we also get benefit of third party integrations like AdWords (now Google Ads) integration if we get all the data from Firebase Analytics into Google Analytics. So, I upgraded my Firebase property to Google Analytics property. The was a pleasant experience to see all Firebase Analytics data in Google Analytics in the format that I understand much better. But soon I realized that there is one important part missing. On The Go, I use Google Analytics App to get a quick glance of ...

Now a days I see many requests for buying my Android Apps. It looks like a new business of sell & purchase of mobile app is coming up. Buying and selling websites and domain is there for quite some time now but app trading is something which looks like a recent phenomenon. Till now there is no way we can calculate price of an app for buying and selling. Keeping this in mind, I have created a website ( http://www.appprice.org/ ) and an mobile app for android (link on the website). Our " App Price Calculator " uses a formula developed by us which gives you an approximate cost of your app. This cost can be used for estimating worth of your app. Please have a look and let me know your feedback -  App Price Calculator

They say last decade belonged to “e” and this decade is going to belong to “m”. No wonder, as mobile is the personal device almost everyone possesses now a days. The word “m” has amazing potential to change the world and there is little doubt that it is going impact our life more and more in coming future. In the “e” decade, Social Networks emerged as the hot trends. Social Networks like Facebook, and Twitter grown like everything. These are the places people started visiting regularly. Even e-mails are left behind by the social networks in terms of usage. Then came "m" decade. With the emergence of Mobile Phones, another concept emerged called “App Store”. Apple’s iPhone lead the show with one single place to download and purchase applications. It simplified download and purchase process. Then there came more App Stores like Google’s Android store and Nokia’s OVI store. I see an interesting trend will emerge in future. I will call it Social Networked App Store (or Just...

While searching information on a specific topic today, I got my hands on a book that I purchased some time back. I generally buy a lot of books, but this book somehow I didn't read earlier. Name of the book is “AJAX Black Book”. Book is published by “Dreamtech Press” and author(s) name is not mentioned. TOC tells us that the book covers following topics – AJAX, XMLHttpRequest, JavaScript, AJAX Frameworks (jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, DWR, Yahoo UI Library, Google Web Toolkit), Maps in AJAX (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps), ASP.NET and AJAX, PHP and AJAX, AJAX with JSF, AJAX with Struts, JSON in AJAX, AJAX Patterns, Consuming Web Services in AJAX, Securing AJAX Applications, Debugging the AJAX Application, Comet, Ruby on Rails etc. Impressive, isn’t it? Or just look like a huge list of buzzwords? For me, I feel disappointed after going through the book. First of all, I don’t know why I bought this book. A book covering so many topics can not detail on the topic. Most of the time basic info...

eXo Platform , the company being eXo Portal and eXo CMS, has brought in $6 million in a first round of funding . As per the press release, the objective is to strengthen sales and marketing in US. eXo already has a strong-presence in France, and with this eXo is all set for US. Congrats Benjamin. Should I say beware Liferay? ;-)

Today Adobe annouced ColdFusion 9 . I worked on ColdFusion long back and I am sure that it has changed a lot since then. I have not used Coldfusion for a long time now, but what caught my attention today is the support for JSR 168 and JSR 286 portlet standards. Support for JSR 168/ JSR 286 in Coldfusion means that Coldfusion users can use readily available portlets like SyncEx with Coldfusion. It gives Coldfusion users more pluggable components as well as give portlet vendors like SyncEx a little more market :-)

Just now heard that eXo Platform merged portal software development into JBoss Community. I am watching open source portals for a long time and here is my understanding of what it means to everybody - What it means to eXo - eXo will be able to expand in USA where it was struggling for a long time What it means to JBoss - In absence of any real apps, JBoss Portal was more of a portlet container rather than a full flegged portal. JBoss suited as a middleware platform, but really lacked features (portlets/ apps) required for a portal. By this partnership JBoss will be able to get CMS, Groupware and couple of other applications that will make it competitive in open source portal market. What it means to eXo-JBoss - eXo-JBoss will be able to compete Sun-Liferay that was gaining market-share day by day. What is means to everyone - Open source portal market will become more competitive and hence we will se better open source portals in future. I want to congratulate Benjamin, Julien and every...

JSR 168 (Potlet 1.0) specification doesn't clearly suggest any mechanism for the inter-portlet communication i.e. communication between two portlets. This was regarded as one of the major short-comings for JSR 168. Though most of the vendors had their own extensions to JSR 168 for managing inter-portlet communication, use of any of those methods defeat the very purpose of JSR 168. In absence of any well defined sophisticated mechanism, JSR 168 developer had to rely upon either PortalContext or Application Scope of Session for sharing information between the protlets. JSR 286 has come up with a well defined model to achieve inter-portlet communication. There are two primary ways by which inter-portlet communication can achieved as follows - 1. Public Render Parameters 2. Portlet Events There are pros and cons of each method. Though the biggest advantage with Portlet Events method is that an object can be passed from one portlet to another as opposed to merely "String" in c...

Dave has blogged about "building a hello world portlet for Liferay portal" here . Though the article is doesn't seems version specific, still as it is written on 1st April, so it should be for Liferay version 5.2.2.

We are starting a new project on JSR 286 and wondering what should be the best IDE for JSR 286 portlet development. The project is on IBM, so IBM RAD (Rapid Application Developer) was the first choice. Though as of now the latest production release 7.0 doesn't support JSR 286 and 7.5 version which supports JSR 286 is just in beta stage. IBM has not communicated any clear date for GA. I think it leaves us to "Portal Pack 2.0 for NetBeans 6.1", a plugin for NetBeans. I have not tested it yet, but it says the support of JSR 286. I am not sure whether it has embedded JSR 286 container for testing portlet within IDE or not? I'll check and update on this. By the way, have you started developing JSR 286 portlets? If yes, which IDE do you use?

Yesterday, IBM announced the availability of WebSphere version 6.1. With this release, the focus was on Web 2.0 and support for JSR 286/ WSRP 2.0. Please check out what is new in IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 - http://my.advisor.com/doc/19519

Previously I used to publish the results of the poll "Which is the best open source portal server" regularly on this blog. I stopped doing that because it became more or less repeatative. Today while visiting the poll section of portlets forum , I found that there are certain other polls going and since it is a long time, I thought to put it on this blog. It may still help you in decision making. Best Open Source Portal Server Which commercial portal meets most of your portal requirements? It looks like Liferay is the portal of choice for majority when it comes to open source portals and 'IBM WebSphere portal' in case of commercial portals. If you have not voted you can also think of voting Portal Poll here .

JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) final release is available to download from the JCP website. Here is the direct link - http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr286/index.html Happy Portlettting.

Two of the leading open source portals have taken altogether two different routes for future development. For Liferay Portal, it is more of community building and social networking features that is taking center space, whereas for eXo portal, it is more about WebOS. This is very interesting because the roadmap of both of these portal platforms is way different from commercial portals. It also shows the courage and innovation of the open source products which is missing in commercial products. I believe in terms of innovation, open source portals are now ahead of their commercial counterparts. I don't know whether it is due to the open source philosophy or due to the tough competition they are facing from commercial portals, but it is very good for the portal space. I wish them all the best. Keep innovating.

Writing Java applications in Visual Studio Dot Net seems an interesting idea. MainSoft promises that only. I have not given it a try, but will be very interesting to check it out. Here is the latest news that talks about this product - Visual Studio and Java?

You would be happy to know that the JSR 286 is approved and the final version should be available soon. By the time, you can have a look at final draft here . I am sure JSR 286 will prove a big leap forward in success of Java Portals. I congratulate spec lead Stefan Hepper and all expert group members for the efforts and hard work.

Today I saw the announcement of "Google Sites" in my mailbox. I use Google Apps services for few of my domains. Just if you are not aware of what Google Apps is, Google Apps is a collaboration platform that can be subscribed by the companies instead any installation locally. In other words, it is kind of hosted portal for an enterprise. It provides quite a few important collaboration features like Email, Calendar, Task, Docs etc. Now the latest addition to this set is Google Sites. Google Sites is a tool for quickly creating new websites and sharing information. Here is how Google defines it - "Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who ha...

In the SharedInsights conference, me and my colleague Hari talk about key issues in portal arena like the need for portlets marketplace, lack of enterprise search and collaboration applications in the portal space etc. Please check out the podcast here.

In the SharedInsights conference, me and my colleague Hari talk about key issues in portal areana like a need for portlets marketplace, lack of enterprise search and collaboration applications in the portal space etc. Please check out the podcast here.