Enterprise Portals

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.