The Portal Zone

Google Cloud Vs Amazon Cloud - An architectural perspective - Part 2

2010-10-05T20:07:00.002+05:30

Cross Post: Google Cloud Vs Amazon Cloud - An architectural perspective - Part 2

Google Cloud Vs Amazon Cloud - An architectural perspective - Part 1

2010-10-02T17:51:00.000+05:30

Cross Post: Google Cloud Vs Amazon Cloud - An architectural perspective - Part 1

Building Java Apps on the Google App Engine

2010-09-20T01:34:00.000+05:30

Cross Post: Building Java Apps on the Google App Engine

Portlets are dead. Long live Enterprise OpenSocial !

2010-01-13T08:42:00.001+05:30

Early last year, I blogged about why I thought JSR 286 was irrelevant. I also speculated that what makes sense was an enterprise version of OpenSocial, which I called OpenEnterprise.Today, I am pretty surprised to see that OpenSocial is indeed moving in that direction. Opensocial.org has published a whitepaper titled "Enterprise OpenSocial". I am yet to read the whitepaper, but this seems to be

Happy 2010

2010-01-07T19:27:00.003+05:30

I am back to blogging after a huge break ! Will try to do more justice to this blog this year :-) That said my 2009 predictions have turned out to be fairly accurate, I guess. Wish you a Happy 2010 !

Portal Zone will now focus on social app development

2009-04-20T16:37:00.001+05:30

Portal Zone was launched in 2006 when I was a part of the Sun's Web Portal team (this was the initial blog: The Old Portal Zone). The intent was to share what I learnt as a part of my day job (Portlets, WSRP, Ajax and such) and also, to be honest, provide a little bit for marketing for Sun's Portal product.In 2007, I moved to another group in Sun and later quit Sun. However, I still continued

Why JSR-286 is irrelevant and how to fix it

2009-02-12T13:11:00.007+05:30

Today I came across an interesting article on java.net :JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance. It also seems to have sparked some discussions in the community: In response to JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance.In the java.net article, the author talks about how the Portlet spec is losing it's edge and makes his point by listing the number of organizations supporting the spec (for Portlet 1.0 it was 24

Portlet 2.0 on JBoss

2009-02-07T11:53:00.002+05:30

Packt Publishing recently published "JBoss Portal Server Development". The books covers Portlet 2.0 on JBoss. Grab the free sample chapter here : "Portals and Ajax" and let me know if you find it useful.

Portal Technology Predictions for 2009

2009-01-06T17:17:00.004+05:30

1. Portlets will lose ground. Opensocial gadgets / widgets will catch up.I blogged about this sometime back. With announcements like Sun's SocialSite and eXo Social, this seems to be already happening.2. WSRP will die.WSRP is a web services standard which allows a web portal to aggregate content from externally hosted applications into it's own. To me this is the Facebook platform gone wrong. It

My Javaworld Article - Portlet 2.0 Quickstart Guide

2008-11-27T12:11:00.002+05:30

I just published a new article in Javaworld titled: A quickstart guide to Portlet 2.0. It talks about how get up and running your first portlet on the JBoss Portlet Container.Makes a good addition to the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial series.

Make any website a social network ...

2008-06-27T16:07:00.002+05:30

... is the theme of the day. Be it Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect or Myspace Data Availability- everyone wants you to use *their* social data.What does it mean for developers ? Not sure. None of these platforms are public yet. And it will be interesting to see how open they will be.

OpenSocial & Facebook Developer Meet in Bangalore

2008-06-17T18:22:00.002+05:30

We are conducting an OpenSocial/Facebook developer meet in Bangalore. If you are interested in learning more about any of these technologies, please feel free to participate.The details are available here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/807031Don't forget to confirm your participation beforehand.

JSR 286 - Too little , too late

2008-06-17T18:01:00.005+05:30

Just noticed that the JSR 286 spec has been finally posted : JSR-286 Now Posted. As you can see, the Expert Group for this spec was formed in Dec 2005. And it has taken 2.5 years for the EG to iterate to the next version. Portlet 1.0 was released in 2003, 5 years back.My personal opinion is that this technology has been delayed to almost a point of irrelevance. And it would be interesting to

Will OpenSocial replace existing portal standards ?

2008-04-18T00:29:00.000+05:30

Going by the current trend it seems that OpenSocial might replace current server side portal standards like Portlets and WSRP for good. OpenSocial gadgets can be considered the Web 2.0 equivalent of portletsWhile portlets are server-side components that depend on aggregation at the server, OpenSocial gadgets are lightweight, javascript/DHTML/Ajax components that aggregate on the client (i.e the

OpenSoShell - OpenSocial developer tool

2008-02-21T23:08:00.003+05:30

OpenSoShell is a tiny open social gadget that can help developers run OpenSocialJavascript API snippets directly within an opensocial container like Orkut or Hi5. It is not meant to be a full fledged IDE or development environment. But it can help complement existing gadget development tools like Firebug.I have released it with an Apache license. Feel free to give it a shot.http://

Portlet Tutorial - Deploying your first portlet to OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0

2008-01-24T08:32:00.000+05:30

This post is a part of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial seriesAt the time of this writing, only Sun seems to have a functional JSR 286 portlet container. Apache Pluto 2.0 is work in progress and I have been unsuccessful in running the Exo Portlet Container.The OpenPortal portlet container is Sun Microsystem's implementation of the JSR 286 spec. Here is how you would deploy the Hello World

Good Javascript resources

2008-01-16T22:01:00.000+05:30

If you are planning to learn javascript or in the process of doing so, here are some pointers.The best way to start is to watch a series of videos presentations from YUI Theater. These videos are brilliant with absolutely high quality content.You can watch the videos in this order: The Javascript Programming Language Part I Part II Part III

Portlet Tutorial - Anatomy of a portlet

2008-01-15T22:01:00.000+05:30

This post is a part of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial seriesNow that we have written and successfully deployed our Hello World portlet, let's understand it's various components.Here is how our portlet would look when deployed in a container.Notice how the portal has created a distinct boundary or window for our portlet. This is called a Portlet Window. Each portlet is visually contained in

Portlet Tutorial - Hello Portlet 2.0 World

2008-01-07T19:34:00.000+05:30

This post is a part of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial seriesAs explained in the previous post, a portlet is a pluggable component that can be run inside any compliant portal server. Here is an example of a portlet running inside a portal.Note how the portlet occupies only a part of the portal page. This is the primary difference between a portlet and a servlet. A portlet is meant to occupy

Interesting 2008 predictions

2007-12-31T07:21:00.000+05:30

Here are some of the interesting 2008 predictions I have come across 2008 Web Predictions What wont happen in 2008 Mashable 2008 predictions PC World Tech Predictions for 2008 Economist's Technology in 2008 Valleywag's 25 predictions Information Week's predictions Happy 2008 !

Ant + Ivy = Maven ?

2007-12-29T07:28:00.000+05:30

A few days back I noted how Apache Shindig is disconnected from the Apache Portals project. Janus Boyce of CMSWatch has opined that this is exactly how Apache functions - innovative but disconnected.Recently I came across the Apache Ivy project which seems to reinforce this sentiment. Apache Ivy is a dependency management framework tightly integrated with Apache Ant, the build tool. And if you

Portlet Tutorial - Web Portals and Portlets

2007-12-28T09:47:00.000+05:30

This post is a part of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial seriesIntroduction to Web PortalsA Web portal is a website that acts as a single point of access for a wide variety of information. Think of a site like Yahoo.On Yahoo, you can check news, shop, read your emails, chat, play games etc. You also have access to a wide varietyof other content and services provided by Yahoo. Yahoo is a good

Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial

2007-12-28T09:40:00.001+05:30

In this ongoing series of blog entries I intend to provide a comprehensive guide to creating web portals using the Java Portlet technology. This tutorial assumes prior knowledge of Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP).Posts in this seriesWeb Portals and PortletsHello Portlet 2.0 World Deploying your first portlet to OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0 Deploying your first portlet to JBoss

OpenID & OAuth – complimentary or competing?

2007-12-21T15:42:00.000+05:30

Been trying to update myself with whatever’s been happening in the security space. There are two new specifications in the realm of authentication and access control that seem to have potential to create a huge impact : OpenID and OAuth. Unlike other efforts in this space, like say the Liberty Alliance these specifications are (thankfully !) simpler and seem much more practical to use and

Apache Shindig

2007-12-18T16:49:00.000+05:30

Apache Shindig is an open source OpenSocial container. It is possible that Shindig ends up being the reference implementation for OpenSocial.This does not seem to be related to the other Apache Portals projects at all, which is quite surprising.