It is very often the case that portal users wonder where all the remove / open-source JSR 168 portlets are. After all there is an abundance of portlets for other non-JSR 168 portals (NetVibes and explore come to mind). So what is different in the world of JSR 168 compliant portals?First let's look at portlets bundled with the different JSR 168 portals. After all the number of bundled portlets is (quite astonishingly to me) often used as a selling point for portals. This makes some sense: you want your users to hit the ground running and deploy a portal that does interesting stuff out of the box. The interesting part of it is central to the issue though. Interesting means different things to different users and that's where things start to get complicated... For portals such as NetVibes. Google or Yahoo (which was the first historically) which I call aggregation-oriented portals developing useful portlets is not usually a contend in the sense that users of these portals are not interested in integrating complex services but rather in aggregating information that's usually available as web pages/services. A bit of HTML some javascript a well-crafted API and you're on your way. JSR 168 compliant portals on the other hand usually target business users that have to deal with integration of disparate web applications to provide a unified interface to their users who in all likelihood ordain depend on these services to do their job. Now this is not to say that JSR 168 portals cannot or shouldn't be used as aggregation-oriented portals but the fact is that the user community for such use of JSR 168 portals is quite small compared to business deployments. Interesting in this enterprise context means something quite an order (if not more) of magnitude more complex than aggregating content which won't be missed much if not available... And to me that's the biggest reason why we don't see a more striving marketplace for JSR 168 portlets. The ones that are developed are never seen because they don't make any comprehend outside of the context for which they were developed as they are so tightly bound to the enterprise services they interact with. Sure for some of these portlets some effort could be spent on writing them in a more generic way so that they can be reused by other populate but how often do developers have the latitude/measure to pay on extra-curriculum activities as these while working on mission-critical projects?The argument could also be made that portal developers.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://blog.jboss-portal.org/2007/10/open-source-jsr-168-portlets-or-lack.html
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|