The JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) specification has been released. Congratulations to Stefan Hepper, the spec lead of JSR 286 and the rest of the expert group. It has been a pleasure working with all on this JSR.

The main features of this JSR include

• Eventing
• Public Render Parameters
• Resource Serving
• Portlet Filters
• Validation based caching
• Request Dispatcher Include & Forward from all lifecycle
• Container Runtime Options
• Enhanced Tag Library
  

OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0, which is a fully compliant implementation of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR286) specification, has been released. Check my blog for more details.

WSRP 2.0 offers Leasing of Portlets as part  of the specification. Leasing is the process by which a Consumer registers with a Producer for a specified time period, after which the Consumer Registration is rendered invalid. Lifetime is an optional parameter in the Registration offered by V2 producers. The OpenPortal WSRP project (Sun's open source implementation of WSRP ) has implemented this feature using the Open Source Portlet Container 2.0 . Check this wiki page for more information on portlet leasing.

Here's a primer on using the Leasing feature.. 

The expense-report widget, that is delivered as a part of the Project WebSynergy bundle, models a typical workflow scenario  where SAW (Simple API for Workflow) could be used. In an organization, employees raise expense reports and submit them to the managers to be approved or rejected. Once submitted, the report triggers a workflow process(in a workflow engine like JavaCAPS), and becomes a pending task for the associated manager. When the manager approves/rejects the report, the report goes to the next step in the workflow process.

This widget has been integrated with a simple JavaCAPS workflow process. If a workflow engine is unavailable, the SAW calls to the  Workflow engine can be disabled using the preferences. If the call to the workflow engine is enabled without configuring the engine, it results in a system error.

 In addition to Workflow, this widget has the following features: 

•  JMaki - Uses JMaki Yahoo Datatable
  

•  Usage of ServeResource feature of JSR286 portlets for Ajax requests (For Displaying Report Details)

Click here to know more about this widget....

Here is a step-by-step screencast showcasing the widget.

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification version 2.0 has been approved as an OASIS standard. Here are the links to the approved specification.

1. HTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-spec-cs-02.html
2. PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-spec-cs-02.pdf
3. XML Schema: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-types.xsd
4. WSDL:
• Interfaces: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-interfaces.wsdl
• Bindings: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-bindings.wsdl

The OpenPortal WSRP Project implements the above all the mandatory and some of the major optional features defined in this specification and milestone 3 binary is available for download.

 
One of world's largest FOSS events, FOSS.IN 2007 is opening in Bangalore. Sun is a platinum sponsor of this event. Sun is participating in almost all the events throughout the five days of conference: Project days,Presentations Demos, Hack center, BoFs, Lightning talks
Click here for the official FOSS.IN page.

is also registering its presence via a host of demos and BoF sessions.Check out this blog for more details

The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets TC has recently approved Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification v2.0 as a Committee Draft and is available for public review. The public review starts from 31 October 2007, and ends 15 November 2007.

This specification was previously submitted for a 60-day public review on 24 July 2007, this 15-day review is limited in scope to changes made from the previous review. All changes are highlighted.

The specification document and related files are available here.

Highlighted PDF copy is available here:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-spec-pr-04-highlight.pdf


The schema and wsdl files are available at:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-bindings-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-extra-pr-04.xsd
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-interfaces-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-service-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-types-pr-04.xsd

Mozilla Labs has an interesting technology - Prism - that aims to quickly bridge the gap between web applications and the computer desktop. Instead of trying to come up with a completely new presentation technology like Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX etc. they have a simple program called Prism that will allow any web application to run outside the browser as a desktop application, so that each web application runs in its own window. It isn't rocket science and there have been similar technologies in the past. But Prism is much more usable and easy to use. I use Prism to run my Gmail and Yahoo Mail as desktop windows. That way my Firefox is free for other stuff and next time I have to restart my browser (which I very frequently do because Firefox can leak memory like a sieve) I don't have to bring up Gmail and Yahoo Mail again. Also the performance of Firefox is not affected because of the email clients that are constantly open.

 There has always been a requirement to run JSR 168 portlets on the desktop as native desktop applications. Prism can be a great solution to do this in a simple and easy manner. Just double clicking on an icon on the desktop will bring up a JSR 168 Portlet running inside Prism. And with Google Gears we can perhaps even make the portlet work offline. :)
 

BEA Systems released their annual State of the Market Portal Report for 2007. The report is titled "State of the Portal Market 2007: Portals and The Power of Participation". The report says that "Portals remain a top priority for CIOs  in large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year". The report adds "portals remain ideal platforms for consolidating applications, helping enable the integration and reuse of existing systems and data, and helping companies introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies to their increasingly tech-savvy user communities."

Some key findings of the report are

• Market: The enterprise portal market continues to grow over nine percent annually, with an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2011.
• Audience expansion: Despite efforts to consolidate, the number of portals deployed in an enterprise is expanding. This expansion is not necessarily due to technical limitations of software but to the increasing number of audiences being supported by portals, and by the improved flexibility of portal technology as a framework to speed application development and deployment.
• Business and IT agility-BPM and SOA: The increased adoption of business process management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives are both driving portal usage. This is because portals already utilize many SOA principles and can deliver and manage premium interaction and contextual experiences.
• Business participation—Web 2.0 and the new enterprise: After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, leading-edge companies are embracing those principles for use in the enterprise. Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer.
• Segmentation: Portal vendors are expanding their offerings to take advantage of BPM, SOA and Web 2.0. Because of the loosely coupled aspects of those technologies, the leaders in the portal market are those that can be the most open while still offering enterprise-grade capabilities like security, branding, personalization and search.
• Benefits: In addition to the revenue-generating benefits reported by the studies, BEA portal customers report additional benefits ranging from increased employee productivity and efficiency, reduced support and service costs, increased customer loyalty, consolidation of IT infrastructure and lower operational costs via reduction in paper-based or manual processes.
• Deployment costs: For 77 percent of BEA portal customers, the cost of consulting services for deployment or customization of software was less than license costs, demonstrating the portal’s value as a rapid, flexible deployment vehicle for a broad range of company initiatives. 

 
Did you know that your intra net portal has stages of maturity? It does! Based on a multitude of primary and secondary sources of research Avenue A | Razorfish  has published a model for how a corporate intranet portal matures.  Some of these will likely be familiar to you

• Stage 1: Homegrown set of  HTML pages that allow for easy sharing of information, often at the departmental or group level.
  
• Stage 2: The intranet portal in this stage has evolved into a company wide entity and uses technologies like ERP to enable self service of HR and Finance systems
• Stage 3: While they include the information sharing and self service aspects of the first two stages, these third stage portals highlight collaboration tools. Companies with a large proportion of knowledge workers are most likley to invest in collaboration or stage three intranets
• Stage 4: These intranets meet the needs of all users by deftly aggregating and prioritizing information based on the role, group, location etc. of the employee
• Stage 5: These portals improve on the enterprise portals in stage 4 by including highly visual and graphical display formats that update in real time and allow for creation of dashboards
• Stage 6: This final stage of intranet portal sites includes application that actually allow for employees to get their work done from applications embedded in the portal page. This stage is called the Consolidated Workplace.
  

If you found this article interesting, you may be interested in
- http://intranetmaturity.com/
-  http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/

Happy Reading.  

It has been a quiet week so far on the blog. Hopefully we'll pull up our bootstraps and start making noise again. :) 

If you are planning to be at CEC 2007 this year, then mark these two sessions in your schedule.

Hope to see you there!

The Java Community Process(JCP) has recently approved JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0 as public review draft and is available for public review. The public review starts from 24 Jul, 2007 and ends 27 Aug, 2007.

The specification document and related files are available here.

The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets TC has recently approved Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification v2.0 as a Committee Draft and is available for public review. The public review starts from 24 July 2007, and ends 22 September 2007.

Schema/WSDL files are available here:

• http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-extra-pr-03.xsd
• http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-types-pr-03.xsd
• http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-bindings-pr-03.wsdl
• http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-interfaces-pr-03.wsdl
• http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-service-pr-03.wsdl

Click to join portlets

If you are a portlet developer and/or user (or for that matter, in the business of building and/or using the infrastructure that serves as the runtime environment for portlets and more, i.e. portal servers) and are not aware of the Portlets Group at Yahoo!, you should consider checking it out.

The description on the group site states "This group is created with the objective of discussing portlets and related technology, their usability and problems associated with them. Portlets related technologies, standardizations and specifications like JSR 168, Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), and JSR 170 (JCR) are some of the discussion issues. Though there is no restrictions, you can discuss anything related to portlet..", as well as "..Popular open source and commercial portal servers can also be discussed here..".

The group was founded in November 2003 and today has an impressive membership roster of 5800+ individuals.