Getting closer to Java Portlet Specification V2.0 products

By Nick Hortovanyi

The Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR 286) has been a long time in the making. In my mind, maybe a little too long. However the promise of having an event model for inter portlet communication between different vendor implementations and indeed Portal servers in one or more locations, through WSRP 2.0, is very exciting.  

I found a good article on IBM Developerworks - What's new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286) , where "Figure . A sample portal page" is showing events between various types of portlets. Its good to see integration with Google Gadgets, which I noticed originally (blog entry here) could not participate in inter portlet communication.  Now, I've been wondering why IBM has been delaying the release of WebSphere Portal 6.1? So I did a search on google to see if WebSphere Portal 6.1 would support it. Low and behold, there was a forum entry saying that current WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta does.  Looking between the lines one would assume that just after the Portlet 2.0, specification is released we will see WebSphere Portal 6.1 become GA.

Rivers of conversations at the edge on twitter

By Nick Hortovanyi

A couple of days ago, I found an article by the Burton Group on the current excitement surrounding Microsoft Sharepoint. As I have a focus with WebSphere Portal, any article describing whats happening with Sharepoint is of interest to me. Especially, when Sharepoint appears to be being chosen because of perceived short comings with other on-premise collaborative software or as a result of pressure from Microsoft only focused consultants.

So I thought I'd tweet about it on twitter (a micro blogging tool). It was a very simple question that I posed "Why is Sharepoint doing so well?" you can see it here. Denis Howlett, of ZDNet fame, who follows me on twitter, immediately responded to me and then off started a discussion, that ended up spanning many people. Denis, summarised the discussions that followed in a blog entry (maybe read from the bottom up). 

It was a very interesting read, as I had not thought of myself as being an edgling, participating in the media fabric. We are using these tools to build relationships and communicate with people, that are not located in the same geographic region as our selves. The usage of these type of tools is second nature to us and an invaluable part of our day.

Through twitter though, I'm seeing some very interesting relationships form and watching some conversations that ordinarily I would not of had the privilege to watch or join in with. You can see what I'm saying from my twitter id hortovanyi. Its hard at times to follow from just one users perspective. So the more you follow, the more interesting the journey down the river will be. Enjoy!

LotuSphere comes to you in Australia

By Nick Hortovanyi

Last week, I disappeared to Melbourne for a few meetings. So I decided to attend the Lotusphere Comes to You in Melbourne event. The main purpose of which was to see what the Lotus attentioned community was like in that city as opposed to Adelaide. In addition I wanted  to see if I could gleam any extra information that I had not picked up from observing the broader online communication from the US based Lotusphere event held earlier in the year.

In terms of numbers, there certainly are a larger number of Lotus business partners and a larger number of people that attended the event, then in comparison to Adelaide from previous years.

The opening speech and presentations were of a good quality and there were a lot of live demonstrations of the products (didn't envy the guys doing it one bit - very nerve wracking, but they did an excellent job). This year it was about building on the existing products introduced last year, such as Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, in conjunction with Lotus Notes/Domino (new versions), Lotus Sametime (new versions) and WebSphere Portal (more accelerators). There were two major new products announced  Lotus Mashups, (which was as a consequence of the work done by IBM's AlphaWorks with QEDWiki) and Lotus Foundation (a new appliance for SMBs). The attention of this new appliance is as an autonomous device working potentially in conjunction with Lotus Bluehouse (a SaaS service targeted at SMBs). I'll write another blog entry about Lotus Bluehouse when I learn more as this represents in my view a significant change in IBM's business model for the SMB market where again in my view, IBM has difficulty competing with Microsoft. There are also elements here that have not been formulated for engagement through the traditional software channel.

There were a few other products mentioned in the speech, feel free to leave a comment if you think they should be mentioned. 

The Web 2.0 moniker was used a lot, I believe it was referring to Client Side Aggregation (CSA) and improved responsiveness to user requests through the use of AJAX components. Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr have components that are considered Web 2.0 by some through using collective intelligence. That is the more that participate the better the experience that is had by an individual.

What really intrigued me about the opening speech was the last slide, where it was mentioned what would be coming in future Lotuspheres - "Immersive Collaboration" got my attention and I wished that they had spent some more time on the items mentioned.

After the opening speech there were two streams, one more specifically for Lotus Notes/Domino and the other for WebSphere Portal & Social Computing. I attended the later stream, which from my observations had a significantly lower attendance then the former stream.

WebSphere Portal 6.1 which is in Beta at the moment, now has a stronger focus on Client Side Aggregation and on the use of REST based services wiht some emphasis towards RSS/ATOM syndication. There are going to be more accelerators (combinations of WebSphere Portal & supporting products targeted at a vertical business problem eg Web Content Management) with the WebSphere Portal Enterprise accelerator being a combination of them all.

It was interesting to see more of the Social Software tools such as Lotus Connections and Lotus Mashups in action.

With the Lotus Mashups presentation, a new type of widget was mentioned being iWidget, which seemed to be an AJAX based component communicating to a Tomcat proxy server. I'd not heard of this standard before, so I've done a little sniffing through Google. I found that it is a new standard evolving being supported by IBM (found it on J Carol's blog - hope the link is correct Developerworks is down for maintenance again) through the OpenAjax Alliance  . If anybody has more information please leave a comment!

Lotus Connections ver 2.0 is slated for this year, so it might be time to install it then. Providing tools for the larger corporates to profile team members & share connections is important, but I still view Lotus Connections working behind the firewall. I did not see much emphasis for the on-demand type organisation that uses composite services from many internal and external distributed organisations (except in Lotus Bluehouse for SMBs). Hopefully we will see more about this next year!

All in all, it was a good event but more so for the traditional Lotus community. Let me explain.

Whilst searching for information on iWidgets I found the following article  - Mashups, Portal, Symphony, Sametime, and more, more, more . Under the WebSphere Portal heading, I found the following sentences "Like many in the Lotus community, I've not paid much attention to Portal in the past, because it's WebSphere. That view needs to change. Even though Portal comes under the WebSphere banner rather than the Lotus one, portals are really a part of the whole collaboration story that characterises the Lotus name. It's now far more closely integrated to the Lotus family of products."

The above statements are so true, I've come from the WebSphere Java/J2EE world and to some degree have been dragged into Lotus (some might say I have been kicking a bit) through my exposure to WebSphere Portal. The Notes/Domino way of developing applications through lotus script (especially pre Eclipse/Expeditor based Notes 8) was in my view out of the question.

I've always tried to view domino based components such as Sametime as black boxes. As I've mentioned before what excites me about Lotus is the products that are not Domino and lotus script based. To that end, what I saw in Lotusphere 2008 and Lotusphere comes to you, was a focus towards the traditional lotus shops and developers.

The question I really have is can Lotus continue to support these two camps - traditional Lotus and Java through composite applications?

Predictions for 2008 using my del.icio.us tag cloud

By Nick Hortovanyi

Its that time of year, when writing about your predictions for 2008 is all the rage. I've been tagging some by others on del.icio.us with prediction2008.

I've included my current del.licio.us tags in descending order of importance. It highlights the areas that I have had an active interest in either for current work or for research of future activities. So i've used them as the subjects for my predictions for 2008.

my del.icio.us tags

• SaaS
• business
• web2.0
• ibm
• soa
• via:aqualung
• development
• google
• collaboration
• innovation
• Microsoft
• architecture
• blog
• Java
• lotus+connections
• opensource

SaaS

Software as a Service will continue to become mainstream , as skilled resources become harder to find, internet connectivity latency decreases with the corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity. Wall Street will be even more attracted to the SaaS recurring pricing models, such that it will provide a higher potential exit price for Venture Capital backed organisations. Thus driving high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation in the SaaS sector then in comparison to traditional on-premise software delivery companies.

Business

Will continue to see their core Information Technology assets as a cost of doing business and will treat it as a commodity component. IT Consultants will find new ways to work with business, that is more closely aligned to business innovation within their specific industry. Nothing that new here, but internal IT skills will become less IT technical and more analytics driven. Marketing departments will take on more responsibility for analytics and data warehousing to improve marketing ROI.

Local markets in the developed world will continue to become a deeper shade of "red", as competition increases, driving exploration of new markets for growth through volume and innovation in delivery and execution. 

Web2.0

Is a technical label, that has been assigned to represent a change of thinking regarding memes around a social and networked world. It has signaled the rise of the long tail, being that of the boutique network connected micro-economy. Organisations in 2008, will reevaluate their methods of engaging with the market, and the micro-economy, as the number of larger and mid tiered firms dissipate through M&As.

IBM

IBM will embrace cloud computing (eg blue cloud) but have difficulties in engaging with customers in this area; whilst it is still perceived internally as a hardware and people services company. Margins for resellers, will continue to dwindle (hardware and software) as IBM software sales, outside of SMB, finally exceed hardware sales and thus moves focus from hardware. IBM will continue to work on, but won't formulate wining strategies in 2008, to take market spend from Microsoft in the SMB software area. IBM's sales force in 2008, focused on on-premise engagement will have difficulties with the off-premise SaaS nature of cloud computing. In 2008, there will be some high profile success stories publicized for Blue Cloud.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture will continue to drive new systems and rationalisation of existing within the larger enterprises. Adoption of the SOA Architecture Style within enterprises will increase. However, unless machine generated, WS-* style service adoption will decrease. Skilled IT Architects capable of service decomposition  between business services and technical services will be in short supply for 2008.

SOA will continue to drive the demand for new on-premise middleware products. A number of new products will emerge in 2008, possible based on SCA/SDO, that allow utilisation of multiple programming languages and development paradigms.

via:aqualung

Thanks Ric lots of great material. Think more will come, including lots of great riffs and conversations. In 2008, I predict Ric will be writing more blog entries. 

Development

The Art of Developing computer systems will start to influence education in the area of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Iterative agile development processes will continue to be favored over waterfall methodologies. Some procurement departments will explore contracts that allow iterative development methodologies, but this will still not be the norm in 2008. This disconnect between what developers do and what contracts state will continue.

There will be increased interest in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby and further exploration of languages or changes to existing languages to support parallel computing. Functional languages such as ErLang, Haskell and OCaml will gain more of the spotlight.

Google 

Google will continue to influence developers through its Google Code. Google SaaS based services will influence development approaches and continue to play havoc with administrators who favor closed firewalls and block external high use URLs. Google will utilise more personal profile data to improve search results and at the same time use it to increase Ad revenue from targeted advertising.

Smaller SMBs will gain trust in Google and really start to question the value/cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure.

Collaboration

Social software will gain some traction in more forward thinking organisations but it will still be an enathma to command and control based management. New products will be developed that utilise analytics in conjunction with project management methodologies to form groups/teams for delivery of specific deliverables based on a continuously moving project plan (isn't this what we do anyway manually?).

Innovation

Business will seek innovation to be internally driven and not from vendors, but will struggle with out outside influence. Australia will invest heavily in building infrastructure to support exporting of innovation overseas.

Microsoft

Will recover the market position lost with WindowsVista . SaaS (or as they call it Software plus Services) will continue to attract media spotlight as Microsoft seeks to gain new revenue streams and move focus from on-premise software. Huge internal debates over this will continue with little leakages, every now and then, to the market over the 2008 year. Headlines may move from Google vs Microsoft to IBM vs Microsoft, if Blue Cloud is a success.

Architecture

IT architecture will be important in organisations, as an enabler of structure. Many more titles containing the term Architecture will evolve in the 2008 year. IT Architects (of whatever title) will continue to find new ways of explaining the value of this abstract thinking to business and further consolidation of this knowledge will occur on the internet, such as at IASA.

Blog

PR agencies will learn how to influence the blogosphere. The informal citizen journalist will continue to eat into the revenues of traditional print media. Blogging in conjunction with bookmarking will become the preferred means over google to find "trusted" content and advice.

Java 

This is the pinnacle year for Java, the programming language, in the enterprise world. As concurrent computing needs are accelerated through the multi-core focus of CPU vendors, it may be perceived that the effort to modify the Java language specifications is higher then the benefits gained by using other programming languages. SOA standards, such as SCA and SDO, are evolving to be language neutral, this will reduce the reliance on Java in enterprise middleware products.

Lotus Connections

This is an interesting product, that shows the possibilities of internet based software behind the firewall. The 2007 year saw, too many new products evolve from IBM in my view, thus there may be in 2008, a consolidation of products to compete against Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services in the SMB space. My blog receives a large number of hits for "sharepoint vs websphere portal" searches on google, so it wouldn't surprise me if Lotus Connections is rolled into WebSphere Portal Express for the SMB market.

Open Source

Will still be here at the end of 2008. Microsoft will continue to push new standards based around its technology stack. The next killer app may emerge if usability and visual issues can be addressed. Has Windows Vista opened the door for the Linux desktops? We'll see this time next year.

It should be WebSphere Portal vs Sharepoint not Domino vs Sharepoint

By Nick Hortovanyi

I've been following the debate over at Ed Brill's blog regarding Domino vs SharePoint redux, a week in the field. This debate is scaring me as the focus is just not correct. I know the Domino guys, have that Notes/Domino as their prime concern because of the experience they have with the product. But the fact remains that the Notes/Domino combination is not Portal technology, which Sharepoint is (even though they have removed that term from the name of the current version).

WebSphere Portal was placed into the Lotus brand and it is about to become a core part of the new Lotus Notes strategic platform through Lotus Expeditor. Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5 has been developed using Lotus Expeditor 6.1. Am in the process of gaining confirmation from Cisco regarding when the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator will be shipped based on Lotus Expeditor.

The ability to create composite applications, with multiple technologies, and have these applications accessible across multiple platforms and pervasive devices seems to be foreign to some of the Lotus Notes/Domino guys. The main discussion, in the comments on Ed's blog was around Workflow, there is an excellent article on user created and managed workflow, in WebSphere Portal 6 at developerWorks here, I must try it out and have it available to demonstrate to clients.

However, WebSphere Portal is not completely dependent on Lotus Domino infrastructure and it competes in its own right against Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007. The new WebSphere Portal Collaboration and WebSphere Portal Enterprise offerings include a number of products inclusive of some of the Lotus Domino based infrastructure components. Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections whilst also being stand alone products reinforce the potential strategic investment that an organisation is making with the Lotus brand and WebSphere Portal.

If WebSphere Portal is part of the Lotus brand then Lotus people should be promoting it. Leading with Lotus Notes and Domino will surely push existing Microsoft Exchange clients closer to Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services.

What excites me about what is occurring in Lotus, is the products evolving that are not based on Domino and Lotus Script!