Portals, SOA and web services are the new buzz this spring. Well if you are involved in software engineering you are probably involved in projects that deal with content management, search, portals, SOA and some form of web services to expose all this content. So what is a portal? For the context of this posting I am using this definition of a portal. For open source java technology I try to stay focusing on JSR-168 compliant technology.
I have had the opportunity to spend some time researching portals lately and have found quite a few decent open source tools that are quite mature. eXo is a enterprise level product used by many organizations. The eXo platform is a powerful JSR 168 compliant enterprise portal built from several modules. It's based on Java Server Faces, Pico Container, JbossMX and AspectJ.
One product I like at least based on initial research is Liferay. It leverages all the best Java frameworks (Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Velocity, WSRP, MyFaces, etc..) and provides a really mature open source portal product. It has been in development for 6-years and is currently in version 4.0 release.
Over at the Apache Portals site, they are brewing Pluto which is the JSR-168 reference implementation, Jetspeed-1, Jetspeed-2, WSRP-4j and Graffito. All the Apache products are actively managed and are evolving fast.
For additional java open source portal technology, the following index contains a listing of quite a few more portal products. On the non-java front, Plone looks promising. It is built with Python. There are quite a few more open source portal products out there which are all evolving.
On the commerical side, there is Documentum which is a suite of enterprise level web applications. Documentum is large and deep. It is another JSR-168 compliant product. I mentioned it in a previous blog posting, "SOA, Data Warehouses and Modeling". Vignette is another product which I am still researching. Lotus Domino is even converging with WebSphere and becoming a player in the portal market.
So which enterprise portal products are the best? With the complexity of portal technologies that is a very difficult question to answer. I been involved with the debate that Microsoft Sharepoint is the solution. Based on my experience as a user of Sharepoint, I think it is somewhat limiting and rudimentary as a portal compared to the technologies I have seen. Everyone seems to be evolving in the direction of some type of enterprise portal. I like to stay focused on JSR-168 since it seems to have the momentum in enterprise portal technology today.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
A Universal OS and new RAD Web Tool
Well, it looks like the operating system wars are coming to an end. Metaphorically speaking, this is the equivalent of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. It looks like due to the overwhelming economics of fighting open source Linux, Microsoft has decided to embrace the open source model, restructure, and support Linux with all its energy. You could see this coming with the recent reorganization announcements within Microsoft's management ranks. Recall that this type of a adaptation worked for Apple when it made a similar decision in the late 1990s for its Mac OS X project.
Economically, sustaining the battle against the open source movement was a draining the corporate giant. With the EU on the verge of fining Microsoft $2.4 million a day for violation of EU antitrust rulings, this has proven to be too much business risk to Microsoft's bottom line. Microsoft did not have any intention of complying with any of the EU's rulings which is exactly what they have done in the US in the past 10-years. Lobbying the EU just does not appear to be working as it has in the US.
In addition to the Singularity project that Microsoft R&D is working on, they have decided to join the Eclipse foundation, support the Novell Mono project, and have announced that internally they have been working on a Mac OS X like project where the Windows kernel will now be based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. The operating systems engineering group has been working on this for the past 3 years and they are nearing a point where they can unveil their progress to date to the world in true Microsoft marketing style, PowerPoint presentations. We will start getting the marketing briefings shortly as Microsoft prepares to adapt. There is a rumor that this project was initiated to counter the growing competition between Microsoft and Sony.
Sony has been collaborating with Apple, IBM, and Toshiba engineering a Linux based operating system that makes heavy use of virtualization and can seamlessly run Linux, Mac, Windows applications with ease. It is designed for the Cell chip and we should be seeing alpha versions of this new yet to be named OS in early 2007. I even saw that it will run on the Playstation 3 which makes a lot of sense.
Now you can see why a 'Universal OS' is on the horizon or at least there is OS convergence happening on all fronts. All the major players are working on some form of Linux kernel based operating system for the future.
On the software development front, the Eclipse foundation and Mono have announced a secret project that will permit developers to build Java, .NET, php, Ruby web applications using a universal web GUI/AJAX RAD plugin. Based on rumored information about early alpha versions, it's capabilities can be summed up to be equivalent of what the initial Borland Delphi 1.0 did for GUI client/server development in 1995. It changed everything as far as RAD client/server development is concerned. As a matter of fact, I saw some early hints that the IBM was purchasing Borland's IDE tools (Delphi, JBuilder) which are now on the market primarily to keep the talented Borland software engineers employed within the Eclipse Foundation. Things that make you go hmmm.
I have been waiting for a 'RAD for the web' type of tool that will give developers back the productivity levels that were attained with Delphi/Visual Basic in the 1990s. In the past few years, open source tools have come to dominate the web development space outside of .NET. With the infancy of Web 2.0, it looks like tools consolidation and a new dynamics have the prevailing winds blowing in the direction of the open source model. I personally have seen many decisions made for this movement allowing organizations to adopt open source technology where Microsoft once ruled. Look at what open source technology adoption has done for the emerging commercial space industry, "The Software of Space Exploration".
2006 is shaping itself to be a year of innovation, excitment, and surprises just as I anticipated. It is only the first of April and yet so much change is happening! I anticipate the next 9-months of this year being just as exciting.
Economically, sustaining the battle against the open source movement was a draining the corporate giant. With the EU on the verge of fining Microsoft $2.4 million a day for violation of EU antitrust rulings, this has proven to be too much business risk to Microsoft's bottom line. Microsoft did not have any intention of complying with any of the EU's rulings which is exactly what they have done in the US in the past 10-years. Lobbying the EU just does not appear to be working as it has in the US.
In addition to the Singularity project that Microsoft R&D is working on, they have decided to join the Eclipse foundation, support the Novell Mono project, and have announced that internally they have been working on a Mac OS X like project where the Windows kernel will now be based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. The operating systems engineering group has been working on this for the past 3 years and they are nearing a point where they can unveil their progress to date to the world in true Microsoft marketing style, PowerPoint presentations. We will start getting the marketing briefings shortly as Microsoft prepares to adapt. There is a rumor that this project was initiated to counter the growing competition between Microsoft and Sony.
Sony has been collaborating with Apple, IBM, and Toshiba engineering a Linux based operating system that makes heavy use of virtualization and can seamlessly run Linux, Mac, Windows applications with ease. It is designed for the Cell chip and we should be seeing alpha versions of this new yet to be named OS in early 2007. I even saw that it will run on the Playstation 3 which makes a lot of sense.
Now you can see why a 'Universal OS' is on the horizon or at least there is OS convergence happening on all fronts. All the major players are working on some form of Linux kernel based operating system for the future.
On the software development front, the Eclipse foundation and Mono have announced a secret project that will permit developers to build Java, .NET, php, Ruby web applications using a universal web GUI/AJAX RAD plugin. Based on rumored information about early alpha versions, it's capabilities can be summed up to be equivalent of what the initial Borland Delphi 1.0 did for GUI client/server development in 1995. It changed everything as far as RAD client/server development is concerned. As a matter of fact, I saw some early hints that the IBM was purchasing Borland's IDE tools (Delphi, JBuilder) which are now on the market primarily to keep the talented Borland software engineers employed within the Eclipse Foundation. Things that make you go hmmm.
I have been waiting for a 'RAD for the web' type of tool that will give developers back the productivity levels that were attained with Delphi/Visual Basic in the 1990s. In the past few years, open source tools have come to dominate the web development space outside of .NET. With the infancy of Web 2.0, it looks like tools consolidation and a new dynamics have the prevailing winds blowing in the direction of the open source model. I personally have seen many decisions made for this movement allowing organizations to adopt open source technology where Microsoft once ruled. Look at what open source technology adoption has done for the emerging commercial space industry, "The Software of Space Exploration".
2006 is shaping itself to be a year of innovation, excitment, and surprises just as I anticipated. It is only the first of April and yet so much change is happening! I anticipate the next 9-months of this year being just as exciting.
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