JSR-286 compliant ajax enabled Atom and RSS news reader Portlet

A colleague of mine, Satya a few days ago talked about JSR-286 and resource serving. He was describing what it is, and how it is a part of the JSR-286 spec. Satya incidentally was one of the key folks in implementing the same for the Open Source Portlet Container. He pointed me also to a nice article by Deepak Gothe and himself about the new JSR-286 specific features in the portlet container.

 After going through the article I was waiting to get started with the JSR-286 implementation of the portlet container and resource serving in particular. So I have implemented a "RSS and Atom feed reader" portlet using the Open Source Portlet Container. The portlet is AJAX enabled as well. To see a small screencast of it in action click here.

This is how it looks (click to enlarge and see in a new window):

 If you want to use this portlet, or try it out, you will need a portlet container which supports the JSR-286 spec, and resource serving in special. As mentioned earlier the Open Source Portlet Container is one of the best. You can get it from the web site as mentioned in the link, or get is as part of the JavaEE Tools Bundle (Choose to "Download with Tools"). If there is interest in this portlet, let me know and I can make it available.

 Read where you can get this portlet source code from on my personal blog@blogspot.

Presence - Dial tone of this century ...

How many times you have wanted to make an important business or a personal call, and picked up the phone to call the other party, but the call ended unsuccessfully, since all you managed to reach was the other party's voice mail? Such unsuccessful calls can be a serious drag on productivity and not to mention the frustration it causes, since instead of talking to each other the parties get to talk to the infamous 'voice mail'.

Or maybe the person you thought was in office actually was on the customer site today and was not reachable on his office number you just dialed. Well this brings in the concept of 'presence' which is so prevalent in the IM world. You begin to chat with a party only when his icon in the chat indicates that he is 'present'.

Now wouldn't that be really nice if we can apply this concept to telephone dialing as well. And why just telephones, we should be able to extend the concept of presence far beyond that.

A user, may opt for several ways in which he can be reached, phone, IM, SMS, Email etc. All of these are different modes of reaching the person. Now, imagine that this same person, can specify or update a unique "address" or a "URI" for each of the means to reach him. Then under his buddy icon, in a client application ( a universal communicator client), on right clicking his name, there appear several of these options to interact with him.

Clicking on the URI corresponding to a phone, will place a IP telephony based call, clicking the URI for email, could launch an application capable of sending an email. As long as the person has kept his information updated on the "Presence" server, the other parties are always able to get in touch with the person, based on his preferences of course.

Thus it would be appropriate to call "Presence" as the dial tone of this century. SIP ( Session Initiation Protocol ) seems to be right way to achieve this kind of communications.

From the portal perspective, the concept of "Presence" makes an absolute sense, since portal is a great way of achieving collaboration and bringing people together. Using a SIP server and a proxy, it seems that getting this above mentioned concept of "presence" into a portal has great potential value. Watch this space for more information on this topic.