Disillusionment with the Portal Space
I'm seeing a disturbing number of large, enterprise clients who have become disillusioned with their enterprise Portal experience, especially those in the WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) space. Millions have been invested, yet the promise of personalized content with aggregation and integrated collaborative tools has never come to fruition. The move to WPS 7.x is a big rip and replace move, and clients are wondering if they should move somewhere else completely.
Portal Software: A horrible option, but what's the alternative
There are loads of Portal haters out there, and sometimes a portal solution is indeed overkill, but when you're talking about large, multi-national corporations, how would one recommend they architect a global solution without a portal server?
Portals aren't always as fun to work with as Tomcat or JBoss AS, but when it comes to integrating multiple applications, managing content, updating individual applications that are deployed as individual war files, managing security down to the portlet level, proving a certain amount of personalization to users, and help with the overwhelming task of managing the thousands of pages large scale enterprises have as part of their internal and external websites, is there a better technology out there?
Garnering community insight and feedback
I've been trying to garner as much insight as possible. I wrote a little article on TSS about the issue:
Which other alternatives to portal exists on market?
I'm also resurrecting a thread at the CodeRanch to see if I can get any insight from that handsome crew.
Updated Thread Asking for an Alternative to a Portal Software Stragety. Circa 2012
I'm also looking for some insight from the twitterati (@potemcam).
It's not so much a cross-posting as much as it is an attempt to really gather some keen insight from the community. If I can get some solid responses and experiences, I'd like to aggregate them into an advice article over at TSS.
What is the right alternative to an enterprise Portal in the Java space?
By the way, I'll be cross-linking to this question from the other sites as well so people with the same questions will be able to bounce back and forth and see what the community is saying on this topic.
Best Answer
First, you need to consider what problems Portal was designed to solve. Is it, as Wikipedia suggest, to bring together information from diverse sources in a unified way? If so, what other ways do we now have to do this?
Well, first, how do you bring together information from diverse sources? The obvious answer is to call a variety of (web) services. This introduces issues of contracts and network latency, blah blah blah, but these are things poorly solved by portal, so it's your call. Suppose the services are RESTful? Does that make managing contracts easier? Possibly.
Then, how do you unify the information? One of the issues that Portal solved was how to bring these disparate items onto one page, and have them load independently. AJAX has grown up since then, and the same effect can potentially be handled using XMLHttpRequest calls to the various (RESTful?) services to get your data, and then using a shared set of style sheets.
Will this work? It can and does. Is it more manageable than JSR286 portal servers? Probably. Are there still a ton of issues to overcome? Definitely. But it's a viable alternative.