A nice article was posted last night by bchaput, focussing on the highlights of the WebSphere Portal keynote session delivered by Larry Bowden (Lotusphere, Orlando)
Me and a collegue will present a seminar at februari 11th entitled, “Can your enterprise handle Generation Y”. In this seminar we’ll present you a look at the new kind of employee in your organisation and how websphere portal and additional products can help you with this.
The seminar will be held at Cronos, Veldkant 33A, 2550 Kontich, Belgium.
More information can be found at: this website
Panasonic has made it choice to switch to LotusLive:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/01/lotuslive-has-scored-a-big.php
In this article I want to give you some of the basics about portlet development and standards around it, so we can make some cool examples afterwards.
It’s important to know the difference between this 3 terms.
The Portal is the overall application. You can think of a Portal as a web application running on a server. It can provide personalization for all or some portlets and all other portal functionality.
A portlet is a small portion of a page inside the portal. Much of it’s API looks the same as servlets, as we see later. But the big difference is that a servlet generates a complete html page, where a portlet only generates a part of it, so no <html>-tag there!
A portlet container runs and manages the lifecycle of the portal.
The first standarized Portal API (1.0) is based on JSR-168. The current version is 2.0, based on JSR-286, and is rather complete when it comes to functionality. We gonna talk about this last version the most.
I will explain the differences during the examples to keep things clear.
To keep things simple, portlets are much the same as servlets. If you already know something about Servlets (and I recommand that), porting your knowledge to portlets will be easy.
Well, I think you get the idea.
It would be too easy for us developers, if everything was the same for both. As you can see in the API, portlets do not extend from servlets. In fact, they are really different internally! They just kept the
names in the same way to let you feel comfortable and to prevent any confusion.
Because you have several portlets at the same page, there can be interaction between portlets, and when you want to refresh a portlet, you actually refresh all portlets on that page.
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:
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.
An interesting blogpost by Pierre Chauvin shows about 40 public websites which use WebSphere Portal in combination with Lotus WCM. It is interesting to see both which companies use WebSphere Portal towards their client base and how flexible you can brand/theme the layout.