Wednesday, March 7th, 2007
Category: Portal
, Screencast, TIBCO
TIBCO GI recently had a webinar on Ajax portlets where they discuss various topics revolving around portals, SOA, and Ajax. The content was recorded and is now available for your perusal.
Ajax RIA + Portal + SOA = Success for H&R Block
H&R Block Sr. Systems Architect, Dan Cahoon, shares how H&R Block delivered SOA-connected Ajax portlets to its more than 12,000 branch offices to deliver composite workspaces streamlining the staffing operations for the nation’s largest seasonal employer. Dan shares his learning from the project and discusses the successful pattern they are reusing to get more solutions to market quickly.
How to Deploy Ajax Portlets to JSR-168 and Other Portlet Containers
Howard Weingram, Sr. Architect for TIBCO PortalBuilder, shows you how to deploy rich Ajax portlets to JSR-168 and other types of portlet containers and more…
The Role of the Proxy in Creating Ajax Mashups within Portals
The role of a proxy in accessing data across hosts and domains.
An Ajax “PageBus” for Client-Side Pub/Sub in Ajax & Portlets
How to architect for modular applications that publish and subscribe to events and message using an Ajax PageBus architecture.
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
Category: Portal, Showcase
Protopage keeps innovating and has just released version 3 of their personal portal.
There are many new features such as:
- A new sharing system called ‘instant collaboration’ that lets you create a set of categorized color coded tabs
- An internal news feed reader with keyboard shortcuts and multi-feed display
- Special news feed widget modes: cartoon mode, thumbnail mode
- Video and audio podcast support
- Multi-category color coded tabs with instant page sharing
- Drag and drop multi-level todo lists
- Widget showcase and developer API, launching with 270 new widgets
- Widget browser with previews and new calendar, clock, comment box and Protopuppy widgets
- Edit-in-place sticky notes
- Integrated search box with 750 preloaded search engines
- Internet Explorer 6, 7, Firefox 1, 2, Opera 9 and Safari 2 browser support
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
Category: Portal, Showcase
I have watched the eXo platform grow for a few years. Benhamin Mestrallet and his team do great work, and now we are seeing the next boost.
They have revamped their UI with Ajax, and it is looking really good.
Each window is a portlet, and both portlets and portal are fully Ajax enabled.
This means that with eXo you have an Ajax front end talking to a Java backend that supports the Java standards of JSR 168, and 170 for the application/windows and the file system. You will also be able to build widgets.
Friday, July 14th, 2006
Category: Articles, Portal
Sami Salkosuo has added fuel to the fire of the claims that "Ajax is perfect for portals and portlets, and we can finally do them right" with his piece DWR makes interportlet messaging with Ajax easy:
Many developers are looking to use Ajax technologies to improve the user experience of Web-based applications, but Ajax programming can be a tricky task. The open source Direct Web Remoting (DWR) library can make Ajax development easier for Javaâ„¢ developers by automatically transforming Java classes into JavaScript classes. In this article, you'll learn how how to use DWR and JSR-168-compliant portlets to build an Ajax application quickly and easily.
The article has a lot of code to show by example, how this all works, most of it Java, with a touch of JSP:
HTML:
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<%@ page contentType="text/html"
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import="java.util.*,javax.portlet.*,interportletmessagingusingajax.*" %>
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<%@taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/portlet" prefix="portlet" %>
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<portlet :defineObjects/>
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src='<%= renderResponse.encodeURL(renderRequest.getContextPath() +
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"/dwr/interface/MessagingBean.js") %>'>
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</script>
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<script type="text/javascript"
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src='<%= renderResponse.encodeURL(renderRequest.getContextPath() +
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"/dwr/engine.js") %>'>
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</script>
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function <portlet :namespace />sendOrderNr(orderNr)
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{
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document.getElementById("orderDetailsOrderNumber").innerHTML=orderNr;
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document.getElementById("customerDetailsOrderNumber").innerHTML=orderNr;
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MessagingBean.getOrderDetails(orderNr,<portlet :namespace />showOrderDetails);
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MessagingBean.getCustomerDetails(orderNr,<portlet :namespace />showCustomerDetails);
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return false;
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}
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function <portlet :namespace />showOrderDetails(orderDetails)
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{
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document.getElementById("orderDetails").innerHTML=orderDetails;
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return false;
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}
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function <portlet :namespace />showCustomerDetails(customerDetails)
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{
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document.getElementById("customerDetails").innerHTML=customerDetails;
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return false;
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}
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</script>
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Thursday, July 13th, 2006
Category: Portal, Showcase
Spotback is a new portal that lets you get very personal with new interest Ajax features.
Once you hit the site you can start to rate stories via slider instead of typical star ratings (I personally feel like stars are more usable as you don't need to drag you can just click). As you rate items highly, new content "like that" will appear for you.
Other nicely done features are:
- Drop down categories
- Simple links to other people who like the content
- The "more..." link opens content up inline
- Simple settings for turning on and off animation, tooltips, high grade bringing in the new story etc
Quite nice really!
Sunday, June 4th, 2006
Category: Business, Portal
Ajax homepage/portal Fold.com has folded (via TechCrunch). Late last year, we were receiving at least a couple of releases a week about new Ajax homepages, so it seemed inevitable there would be some casualties in this crowded space.
In some cases, it's difficult to see how each of these products differentiate itself from the competition, and that's going to be a problem when the competition includes some of the players in the industry. Some create an even bigger obstacle by requiring registration before you can even test drive the site.
Though the site is closed, the blog remains open, with the following message:
I'm currently busy working on other stuff so Fold is deactivated for the time being.
Thanks for your interest.
TechCrunch observes that Netvibes and PageFlakes both received recent funding rounds.
Maybe this is a one-off, or maybe there's some consolidation coming up in this area. Are people really using these sites as their homepages? Their blog readers? It's hard to gauge, as there hasn't been much mainstream interest about them.
Thursday, January 5th, 2006
Category: Portal, Showcase
Kevin Rose of Digg.com said "man, recently we keep seeing more and more portals out as Ajax examples".
Well, we have another one with 24 Eyes.
Special features of 24eyes.com include:
- RSS Dashboard with at-a-glance news overview
- Web 2.0 user interface with instant personalization
- Multi-country services with local content
- Preconfigured content with 200+ catalogs
- Social network services and dashboard sharing
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
Category: Portal
Techcrunch recently posted on the flood of ajax desktops, highlighting the recent Eskobo. Eskobo looks very similiar to a lot of the ajax portal apps you've probably seen, with the drag and drop funtionality and ability to add your own feeds.
A more interesting player in this crowded space is Porcupine Web Application Server, from Inno:Script. Its an open source (LGPL) server designed for creating ajax web apps via servlets, Python server pages, or XML-RPC. The demo (login with demo/demo) opens up an impressive window based gui in your browser. Check out the Quix widget in the demo, their javascript engine for building UIs from XUL in IE6+ or Mozilla/Firefox.
From their wiki:
Porcupine provides an object-oriented framework for rapid development of Rich Internet Applications. The server side components consist of an embedded object database and a multi threaded TCP-IP server capable of executing Python servlets and Python Server Pages. Porcupine also includes QuiX, a JavaScript XUL motor that can be optionally used on the client side for deploying rich user interfaces.
I have yet to see one of these ajax portals or desktops replace a combo of google, gmail, and an online feed reader as the best starting point for getting things done.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
Category: Portal
We have a new contender in the "Ajaxian Portal" stakes (after start.com, googles additions, etc).
Netvibes is the new kid on the block, and is developed by a quality french team.
The aim of it is to provide a place on the internet where you can set just the content you like, a super easy way of building your personalized homepage, available anywhere, anytime. No registration is needed, however if you want to access your page from another computer you'll be able to do it by registering with your email address and a password. As you can see on the left there are a lot of features still in the works, but we've decided to put Netvibes online as it is now so you can start playing with it.
Check out the live beta of Netvibes
Check out the Netvibes blog for more info
They are working on:
- create more localized versions
- use localized informations feeds for each languages and countries.
- add more applications that use RSS (like flickr,...)
- check integration, synergy with other web 2.0 applications
- opera, safari, mobile integration
- integrate collaborative features between registered users
Kudos to the Netvibes team, and thanks for having ajaxian.com as one of the feeds on the page! Much appreciated!
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
Category: Editorial, Portal
We are hearing a lot of timewarps back to 1999/2000+, and Brad Neuberg joins in the back-think:
Commercial Wikis such as SocialText and Jot have come out with in-place editing using DHTML and AJAX. Recently I was looking through some old CDs and found a project I created named OpenPortal that prototyped similar techniques.....in 1999
Brad details his journey and thinks back to his weblets:
<weblet:BUSINESS-CARD id="Brads_Bcard">
<H1>Business Card for
<weblet:NAME>Brad Neuberg</weblet:NAME></H1>
<H3>
<I>Organization:</I>
<weblet:ORGANIZATION>OpenPortal</weblet:ORGANIZATION>
<I>Phone-Number:</I>
<weblet:PHONE-NUMBER>212-853-7201</weblet:PHONE-NUMBER>
<I>Email:</I>
<weblet:EMAIL>bkn3@columbia.edu</weblet:EMAIL>
</H3>
</weblet:BUSINESS-CARD>
Are you reminiscing?
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
Category: Portal, Showcase
People were excited to see what Google would come up with, when they showed their personalized search page.
Microsoft has a sidekick project: Start.com, which looks similar to the Google portal.
There is a lot of Ajax going on there, from having portlet which have their own little lifecycle, dynamically being able to change the layout, and more.
A few quirks are around too, such as right-clicking in areas, and it looks like you can drag and drop in places that you can't.... and it takes you a bit to grok their usability... but hey this is beta!
Click on the left top logo and poke around.
Monday, June 6th, 2005
Category: Portal, Showcase
Claude Hussenet has put together another portal example that shows how each component can have its own lifecycle, allowing you to add stocks directly in the interface and having the component auto refresh via Ajax.
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005
Category: Ajax, Portal
Google has a tradition of reinventing a service that Yahoo! already has (Gmail, Maps).
I would be willing to bet that GPortal is around the corner. How will Google be able to reinvent that bad boy? This is where Ajax comes in.
Ajax finally delivers on the vision of the portal/portlets. None of the annoying lifecycle issues, and change pages when in different modes... now the components can really have a nice lifecycle and the portlets can change in the page itself.
There will also be a nicer way to rearrange your portal (like this example).
I can't wait to see it ;)
