4/29/2006

What is Google Upto?

Google had come with a bang, when it released GMAIL. Since it provided larger storage space with higher user interactivity using AJAX , Gmail became an instant hit. It surely must have made other Email Service Providers a bit nervous. Microsoft is still working on coming up with new Hotmail version, through its Windows Live Mail system. Google has been able to come up with newer technologies regularly, which include GOOGLE MAP API’s, Enterprise API’s among others.

Recently, Google has come up with its new syndication protocol called GData. It is XML based syndicate RSS or ATOM and it provides extra functionalities of Queries, Authentication and Optimistic Concurrency. So what Google is actually aiming to achieve? Well what I guess, Google is trying to bring Collaboration to Web ( or to GOOGLE ;)). Sharing knowledge and forming collaboration in teams has always been a key factor in Enterprise Applications. With Blogs and XWikis this has taken a new dimension. I call it - “Lightweight Collaboration Solutions”. IBM is already coming up with QEDWiki which uses AJAX, ATOM and RSS feeds.

Google has already come up with its implementation of GData in form of Google Calendar Data Api. It provides calendar functionality, which is essential for collaboration. The organization can use these APIs to develop light weight collaboration suites. But yes, this will require sending huge amounts of data to Google. But in that case, Security will be an important concern for the organizations.

We are bound to see exciting development in this area, in not so far future!

4/20/2006

AOP Aspect Oriented Programming in Portlets

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements OOP by providing another way of thinking about program structure. While OO decomposes applications into a hierarchy of objects, AOP decomposes programs into aspects or concerns. It is usefull when the system has cross cutting concerns, for example in trasaction and security.

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD, another name for AOP) helps you design applications in which you implement a single concern (requirement) in one artifact only, known as an aspect, even if the concern is crosscutting (affects multiple artifacts). Here is an article on usage of AOP with jsr168 portlets.
Article Link

4/16/2006

Can AJAX help Portlets?

I have been posting a lot of stuff on AJAX and portlets. There are a few short comings of portlets technology. A few of them can be answered by AJAX or similar technology in future. I have already posted about how AJAX can help in increasing the user interactivity in portals and it can reduce the amount of content to be transferred on the page. This has already been incorporated by some portal servers such as Sun Portal Serverand Stringbeans.


One of more debated topics of Portlets have been the inter-portlet communication. I have been asked questions like can AJAX be used in inter- portlet communication. Well, I don’t think AJAX can play very important role in IPC as it is the Portal Implementation specific. The common IPC scenario is where there are two portlet windows on the same page, on action from window should change content on the other portlet window. Now, can this be achieved through AJAX ?? It means that in this case the whole page need not be rendered and only the content of those portlets can be rendered. Hmmm ….well possible, may be if you are keeping both portlets listening to the server thru AJAX after every short span of time. But to achieve this I guess a new AJAX support to portals should be incorporated.


One of the other sought after topics for Portlets was can we show the other documents like excel, doc, pdfs etc on a portlet. And the answer to that is no because to show the different documents we need to change the content type of page. I GUESS this can be solved by AJAX Linking and Embedding ALE technique being shown by Zimbra. It says that instead of embedding objects that are backed by installed desktop applications (e.g. a spreadsheet or drawing application), within the ALE world the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document. This might give us the solution of maintaining some excel work on one portlet and doing some other work on another portlet like seeing some charts or reports etc.


I will appreciate any more feed backs as this is a lesser explored issue.

4/14/2006

Live Clipboard – Next step from Ajax


We have seen ajax importance in developing RIAs and faster applications. Where user can play with various drag and drop functionalities, faster response time and flashy displays on the same web page. Google have kind of lead the way with its Gmail and more recently Google Map Ajax apis.

But have you ever thought of communicating between two separate web-pages. Like copying from one website and pasting to another…..Well yeah that’s what Microsoft’s new early draft specifications is all about. Its called Live Clipboard. We see now RSS implementation & support sign on various sites, we might also see a Live Clipboard support by sites in near future.

Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie gives more information about it.
Link. Also check out the Example of Live Clipboard

4/12/2006

Red Hat acquires JBoss for $420m

Its JEMS portfolio currently includes JBoss AS, Hibernate, and the JBoss Portal, jBPM, Rules, Cache, Transactions, Messaging products, as well as a JBoss branded version of the open source Eclipse IDE.

Read more

Exo V2 released portal 1.1


The exoplatform one of the well known OS portal server has released their new version of portal. Here are the features of new product release. They also have a plan of adding more feature full product range. Below are links from where u can find the download link for the portal.

That new version comes with a huge set of new functionnalities
including:

* Enhanced Portal Navigation and pages customization: Drag & Drop functionality of portlets
* Advanced Security: LDAP support and each portal, navigation tree or
page can be configured with a set of permissions allowing members of
group to see them or not.
* Enhanced Portal Navigation and pages customization:
* Collaboration and Information sharing: according to who you
are but also to the role you have in a group you can get the
information that is relevant for your intesrest and work. Version 1.1
comes with and enhanced community concepts which allow a fine
priority selection on the communities.
* Web Content Accessibility : most of the rendering HTML and css
has been rewriten to fulfill the WCAG 1.0 specification and to allow
the product to be used in federal and public organizations.
* Enhanced Monitoring Capabilities:it is now possible to monitor
portlet, page and portal accesses thanks to chart and efficient arrays.
* High performance and scalability

Download link

exoplatform.com

4/11/2006

Jackrabbit 1.0 JCR, JSR 170 released

Apache has announced the release of Jackrabbit 1.0, an implementation of the Java Content Repository (JCR, JSR-170).Read More

4/09/2006

Inter Portlet Communication IPC

Inter portlet communication, is not that well defined in JSR 168 specifications. The only way to achieve it is to put the shared data in application scope session of portlets. No specifications were given for a Portlet to communicate to another portlet which is not placed on the same page. Different vendors have implemented the IPC in different ways. Here are some links to the articles which can be very interesting to be read esp. for IPC.

Comparing Various Vendors Implemetation of IPC

Tip Java.net

Sun IPC

Jboss-Recurring IPC

IPC Sun Portal

i will be adding more links and sites to his postings as an when more things happens. I appreciate comments to suggest more links.