JSR 168 Portlets & JSR 286

Social Networked Mobile App Store: Emerging Trend

2010-07-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

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 "Social Store"). App Stores are the places all mobile users are already visiting frequently now a days. In future, these App Stores will expand to full flagged Social Networks. Or in a simple language Social Networks and App Stores will converge to each other.

App Stores have many advantages over current social networks (or at least can fulfill the gaps) like Facebook as follows –

They have integrated payment system. We know that Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are still in search of a right revenue model. They are struggling in making money. This gap can be easily fulfilled by the App Stores in the form of integrated billing and one click payment.
Mobile Phones already have friends list with them in the form of phone address book. Friend’s list is one of the key element of a social network. Future Social Stores will start utilizing this contact information and start building the networks.

Power of integrated billing and access to friend-list makes App Store future of Social Networks. Either the current social networks will have to converge to App Stores or there will be emergence of new kind of Social Networks in future which I call "Social Stores".

What is your opinion? Do you see anything like Social Stores emerging in future?

AJAX Black Book – A Quick Review

2010-05-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

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 information is well covered by the product websites itself and you do not need any book for first level of information.

Moreover, author(s) names are missing. No good author will allow published to publishing their work without giving them credit. This is generally the first criteria for me while buying the book and that is the reason I wonder why I bought this book at very first place. I like the way Wrox/ Wiley published photograph on the book author on the front page of the book itself.

The book is not worth the money. None of topics are given enough details so that a reader can develop enough confidence. Expected user level is mentioned as “Intermediate to Advanced” on book but the detail is not enough for a school student.

There is no highlighting for important points. Summary of the important points is also missing. Examples are missing altogether. Looks more like a book on “History” or “Geography” than “development” to me. All in all, I would not recommend spending your money on this book. With so many good books available on this topic, you should definitely stay away from this book. I also learnt a lesson that we should be careful while purchasing books by “Dreamtech Press.” I guess “Dreamtech Press” books are available only in India.

You can read limited preview on Google Books.

eXo raises $6M to strengthen US Market

2010-03-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

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? ;-)

ColdFusion supports JSR 168/ JSR 286 now

2009-10-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

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 :-)

eXo Portal Merges into JBoss Community

2009-06-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

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 everybody involve in this partnerhip. Way to go.

Here is the press release for more information -
Partnership announcement press release

Inter Portlet Communication in JSR 286

2009-04-20T01:18:00.001-07:00

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 case of "Public Render Parameters" method.

Both the approaches has been talked about in this blog post with the implementation approach. Please have a look - http://blog.xebia.com/2009/04/19/inter-portlet-coordination-with-jsr-286/

Tutorial: Hello World Portlet on Liferay

2009-04-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

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.

IDE for JSR 286 Portlet Development

2008-07-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

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?

IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 - What's New?

2008-07-01T14:36:00.000-07:00

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

Portal Polls & Surveys

2008-06-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

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 Final Release

2008-06-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Social Networking Portal and WebOS

2008-06-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

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?

JSR 286 Approved

2008-03-07T02:13:00.000-08:00

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 JSR286 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.

Google Sites - Challenging Portals

2008-02-29T00:48:00.000-08:00

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 has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. " The more information can be found at Google Sites help at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/sites.html.

Now with the announcement of Google Sites, I believe that Google has started challenging Portal market. I think, Google is soon going to be the the free hosted sharepoint available to all. Though Google Apps is still at initial stages so we have some time where we see that Google started grabbing some portal market. I personally see that initially it will start affecting open source portals and small portal vendors before taking over biggies like Microsoft and IBM. We will soon see Google Apps catching fast in at least SME segment.

Where do you think Google Apps is heading? Do you also think that it is going to challenge portal market (especially collaborative portals)?

Portal Podcast

2007-06-13T14:40:00.001-07:00

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.

Portal Podcast

2007-06-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

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.

SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment Announced

2007-05-10T04:03:00.000-07:00

SAP AG today announced that the Java EE 5-based SAP NetWeaver(R) Composition Environment (SAP NetWeaver CE), a next-generation set of standards-based and integrated composition tools, has been released to customers and partners for full production use. SAP NetWeaver CE, which is used for the development and deployment of composite applications, will also be available for a 30-day trial download on SAP Developer Network (sdn.sap.com) starting in May....................Read More

My Note: SAP's support for standards was always sloppy, especially JSR 168. So it is good to know that SAP is ahead in supporting standards this time.

iSeries/ AS400 Integration with Portals

2007-05-04T01:23:00.000-07:00

iSeries integration with portals is one need that keep coming to us time to time. As always, IBM's product line is so confusing that it is very difficult to find out the product(s) that exactly fit to your requirement. On top of that, finding information on IBM products on web is not easy. As always their documents are so confusing and very difficult to find. So for the benefit of readers, I want to share some details on the products for iSeries (System i or AS/400) integration available from IBM. Following is the list of the products available for integration purpose -

1. iSeries Access Family components:

-- iSeries Access for Web

--The iSeries version of WebSphere Host Publisher

--WebSphere Host Access Transformation Server Limited Edition (HATS LE)

2. WebSphere Host On-Demand (a part of WebSphere Host Integration Solution)

3. IBM WebFacing Tool (part of WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc))

4. Full functioned WebSphere Host Publisher packaged with the Host Integration Solution

5. Full functioned WebSphere Host Access Transformation Server (HATS) packaged with the WebSphere Host Integration Solution

IBM has vast information in it's (difficult-to-find) redbooks. I think these two redbooks are useful for this topic -

Redbook: iSeries Access for Web and HATS Limited Edition: V5R2 Hot Topics for IBM eServer iSeries Browser Users

Redbook: WebSphere Portal Express and Express Plus V5 for the IBM eServer iSeries Server

I hope this information will be useful for the readers.

If you aware about any source of similar information, please share with me.

Process and Integration Portals

2007-02-12T22:23:00.000-08:00

After the collaborative portals and groupware on portals, it seems the time for vendors to focus more on integration portals and process portals. BPM and Integration is suppose to be a main feature for Portals. Though Process portals are being discussed for quite some time now, but we did not see any release which is more oriented towards middleware and hence provides the tightly integrated capabilities for enterprise application integration, business process integration and single sigh on. Oracle has came up with much focused efforts in this direction by announcing Oracle WebCenter Suite. This is a welcome efforts in that direction.

You can check the release announcement here.

You can also check an interesting demo for the Oracle WebCenter.

Gartner on LotusSphere 2007

2007-02-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

Here is what Gartner thinks about Lotusphere 2007.

Here is the excerpt -

Significant updates to Lotus Notes and Quickplace, as well as the introduction of some compelling new products, were the reason that IBM's Lotusphere 2007 was buzzing with positive feedback from IBM customers and partners.

Perhaps the best news coming from Lotusphere is the near-disappearance of the bewildering "Workplace" name. The folding of Workplace into WebSphere Portal has helped to reduce the confusion regarding its strategy, messaging and products. While Workplace was, in Gartner's view, a failed marketing effort, its underlying concepts embracing the Web have provided a critical foundation for Notes 8, Quickr, Connections and Sametime — which are all built on Eclipse with the Expeditor tool. Combined with the recently added representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces, Atom syndication capabilities and "mashability," these concepts serve as a strategic architecture for all future Lotus products.

IBM hopes Lotusphere 2007 will launch an updated, more competitive and appealing Lotus. The demonstrations and product sessions have been successful among the Lotus users who come to these events. However, several challenges persist. The relationship of Quickr to existing products like Domino Document Manager, DB2 Content Manager and new document-oriented clients remains murky. While the mashups and possibilities of social software are promising, the lack of consumer-focused or Web 2.0 software-as-a-service offerings limits penetration.

IBM has addressed many of the lingering questions about Lotus's future direction and managed to inject a level of excitement in a product line that many consider moribund. During 2007, we will watch for signs that IBM has effectively executed on its plans and expanded rapidly into other delivery and business models.

JSR 168 Portlet Development Guidelines

2007-01-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

Drew Varner, Sr. Pricipal Consultant at BEA, has written a good post on JSR 168 portlet development guidelines. These are some basic guidelines that a portlet developers must aware of. He has also given examples to support his views. Here are the guidelines -

1. Always Utilize the URL Rewriting APIs for Content in Your Portlet
2. Do Not Append Paths to a Rewritten URL
3. Qualify Client-side Script Variables and Methods with Namespaces
4. Ensure Inline Client-side Scripts that Refer to Portlet Resources Follow the Spec
5. Always Declare a Content Type for Portlet Responses
6. Do Not Send Cookies from Portlets
7. Separate Business Logic from Presentation

Please check his post for details.

WebSphere Portal Express 6.0 Announced at Lotusphere

2007-01-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

In the past, IBM discontinued the Express edition of portal. Today IBM has again come up with Express flavor with new attires. This time it is going to be an integrated portal and collaboration platform for SMBs. Other than all regular feature of portal, I believe that it will also have some out-of-box intranet features, so that SMBs can build and deploy their intranet easily. It also has some pre-built sample websites to pick and customize. You can check press release here.

Even though I am at Lotusphere, I missed the annoucement. I'll check more details today and post it here.

Other than WebSphere Portal Express 6.0, IBM also announced following products in Lotusphere conference -

Lotus Connections, Press Release
Lotus Notes and Domino 8
Lotus Quickr
Lotus Sametime 7.5.1
IBM Websphere Portal Express Version 6.0
Lotus Component Designer
Lotus ActiveInsight
Lotus Workforce Management

A brief of these annoucements can be found here.

I am at Sun Microsystems's booth showcasing our SyncEx Collaboration Suite on Sun Platform. I would glad to entertain everybody who is interested in these products.

Sun Java Portal Server Startup Resources

2006-10-30T00:52:00.000-08:00

Good collection of articles for Sun Java System Portal Server at one place -

Click Here

AJAX with JSR 168 Portlets

2006-09-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Greg Ziebold and Marina Sum has written a good article titled Best Practices for Applying AJAX to JSR 168 Portlets. Check it here.