I don't consider myself a fan of Portals, but to be fair, there are more
to Portals than just the portlet pages. The Portal provides a one-stop
administration for the entire application which can consist of multiple
Portlets / Applications. You also get single sign-on for all Portlets
hosted on the Portal and most Portals ship with a plethora of enterprisy
applications.
The user can see only the "portlet pages".
However, the Ajax/CMS based solutions also have SSO and nice
configuration of those portlets like "boxes". It's just that most of the
serverside solutions are PHP based.
Its a shame the Portal spec deviated so much from the Servlet spec.
Servlet based frameworks have to jump quite a few hoops to comply with
the Portlet spec.
Yes it is. I haven't seen any portlet implementation that is fast -
because the requirements ask
too much from the server. If a portal was fast, it was not using the
portlet specification.
So I believe that the best way to have what the users want "portlet
pages", si not to use the portlet specification, but the CMS+Ajax like
approach - since this is the only fast solution so far.
Joseph.
