ITWorld Canada reports on the launch of a new multi-vendor initiative to foster the JSR168 and WSRP open standards for webapp 'portlet' programming with the launch of a new Portlets Open Source Trading Site

POST aims to help companies kickstart their portal deployments, leading to faster time to value for all portal customers by providing open source portlets and a forum to exchange and learn about how these emerging new standards.

A Portlet Primer

For those unfamiliar with portlets, imagine a website for emergency response call-centre support where one panel of the screen is the map of the sensor regions, another the directory of contacts, another the local weather conditions and another for the security webcams. Each of those panels can be a distinct application, each from a different vendor, linked together via the shared portlet API specification to create one unified desktop application. TCI created just such a portal recently for use in the Alberta oil fields.

Now consider what happens if the vendor of the original portal framework closes down, or even if they just change their minds about the direction of their software and go off in some other direction (as happened to us with MetaDot). What now?

Enter the open portlet specification initiatives JSR168 and WSRP where the individual webapp vendors can create an application on one portal framework, and deploy it on any compliant framework; nothing novel here, since we already know that any web application developed for Tomcat is very likely to also work under Jetty or JRUN for exactly the same reason. In essence, this is exactly what the new open specifications can now do for these small-services web application components.

Learning to Share

The innovation with the new POST website is to further ensure the long-term health of portal deployments by distributing the development costs for common components ... ie. by learning to share code through the opensource auspices mediated by SourceForge. In this way, everyone who needs a weather portlet or even a security webcam portlet need not bear the brunt of the entire cycle of design, development and maintenance themselves, and when they tire of it, other users of the portlet are protected from the loss through having every opportunity to carry on the maintenance themselves.

As they told you in kindergarden, when we learn to share, everybody wins.
[ Source: ITworldcanada ]