WebSphere Portal Development

Today I attended the first conference day at Devoxx, which is actually day 3 (first 2 days are university days).

The start of the day was in a way a disappointment since, as many developpers, I wanted to know more about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and the future of Java. But since it is still an EU-issue, the keynote wasn’t really about that. Instead Sun and Oracle both had a seperate keynote. The last keynote was of Adobe which showed an overall view of some of the products they develop.

I was very interested too see Scott Ambler’s presentation. This presentation was about the agile vs the traditional vs the ad hoc development. Scott showed 20 myths about agile development and proved by statistics if they we’re right or wrong. Some examples:

• Agile is just for small teams
• Most agile temas are co-located
• Agilists don’t write supporting documentation.

After showing the facts, all these myths proved to be incorrect. This presentation was great and Scott really is a wonderfull speaker, but what I missed in this presentation was his opinion about this mythes and how things could be better.

After lunch I stumbled upon the presentation about HTML5 Communications. I first attended James Gosling’s presentation, but since it seemed like a marketing presentation about the Java Store, so when the sound system broke down (for all rooms!) I switched rooms. The talk about Frank Greco was very good. Due to this HTML 5 event model, which will change a lot for all nextgen webapps. He even mention that the mashup-functionality of portals will become obsolete!

“Traditional Programming Models: Stone Knives and Bearskins in the Google Age” by Cameron Purdy used ‘Google’ in their name to get more attention, but it certainly was an interesting talk about distributed programming.

The most interesting talk of the day was without a doubt Doug Tidwell about Cloud computing. The presentation talked about solutions for the challenges cloud computing had, and Doug garanteed that Cloud Computing is the next big thing since the evolution of the web. And since we are all using cloud computing in our daily lives, he’s probably right.

The last presentation of the day I attended was about Lift, a framework for Scala. Timothy Perret started with an introduction to Scala, and after that went to Lift showing demo’s and code, which made it very straight-forward to follow.

Andy Pemberton has written an article about the new Portlet 2.0 support in Spring 3. He uploaded a small example that you can put in your portal straight away. The article focusses on the interesting things Spring 3 is about to release when facing portlets.

http://blogs.captechventures.com/blog/andy-pemberton/spring-3-example-portlet-and-overview

Want to star your own Netvibes-like website? JPolite provides a lightweight front end Portal Framework based on jQuery. Version 2of this framework is build up unobtrusive, has various module types and templates and provides RESTful resource representation with XDO.

More info on the JPolite website

Manning is about to produce a new book in it’s ‘In Action’-family about the development of portlets. The book is written by Ashis Sarin and will contain 13 chapters of which only 2 are published so far in the early access phase. Reading this book for the first time, it looks promising, giving an easy to understand introduction to portlets.

The book uses Liferay as it’s default portal server, because it is available at no cost. The book focuses on the new 2.0 specifications and gives in depth information for using porlets with Spring MVC and the usage in the enterprise environment.

Overall this book looks very promising. It’s release date is planned for september 2010.