Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

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 :-)