Sunday Mar 30, 2008
Getting closer to Java Portlet Specification V2.0 products
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.
Tags specification wsrp java ibm portlet jsr-286 portal websphere+portal | Comments 0
Thursday Aug 16, 2007
Projecting your organisation through portals
It happened to me again, I was talking to someone seeking information about their products and services. With me being the person that I am, the questions that I ask soon go past the current technical knowledge of the person I am talking to. So at this stage, I'm directed to their portal.
This means another login, url etc to remember.
What I'd love to see from these guys is the ability to consume their content such that I can bring it into my portal, and place it where I want it. WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) is one way of achieving this through consumption through a secure service of a remote portlet.
So reading this, one could argue that the content should be open and free.
However, the business community at large, is not at the same level of appreciation in my view about the benefits of openly sharing information, as say the IT community. One way of describing a more restricted community is as a gated community, where members of that community need be known and authorized to access the content.
Thursday May 24, 2007
How many different organisation's Portals do you interact with in a day?
Portal technology is great. I've been a proponent of it for a while now and am starting to see the next wave of issues evolving from an outside person looking in. That is as I engage with more organisations, there are more portals that I need to engage with to be able to complete activities for my clients.
As an IT Architect, to some degreee, I'm becoming a broker between the client and vendor portals. This is normally ok, if there is one or two portals to interact with, any more and you are spending a significant amount of time potentially finding information through unfamiliar navigation.
To overcome this issue what we need is more effective ways of projecting relevant information into our own portal, such that it is a ubiquitous experience. One approach is to replicate the vendors information in your environment and then create portlets and applications to expose it within your portal. This could become quite expensive when change occurs through the need to update interfaces and applications. Another approach would be to use WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) to project that content externally into your own portal, with you corporations theme, but your vendors content. I'm not seeing many organisations promoting this approach quite yet but would see pressure starting soon by the more progressive organisations on their trading partners to start supplying WSRP enabled content and portlets shortly.
This issue is sure to become larger as organisations start using more external service providers to stream line activities and align expenses more closely with sales.
Tags wsrp business extranets portal | Comments 0
