Portlets are dead. Long live Enterprise OpenSocial !

Early last year, I blogged about why I thought JSR 286 was irrelevant. I also speculated that what makes sense was an enterprise version of OpenSocial, which I called OpenEnterprise.

Today, I am pretty surprised to see that OpenSocial is indeed moving in that direction. Opensocial.org has published a whitepaper titled "Enterprise OpenSocial". I am yet to read the whitepaper, but this seems to be very similar to what I had in mind when I wrote my previous post.

Does this means that we'll finally get to see a decent component platform for enterprise portals ? Of course, OpenSocial is far from being perfect. They still have a lot of technical as well as non-technical issues to fix (I'll take that up in a future blog post). But it's probably better then JSRs that take years to materialize. What I find most interesting is that this spec will extend way beyond the Java world, much like what the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms are today.

Have you read the whitepaper ? What's your take on Enterprise OpenSocial ? What next - Enterprise Facebook :-) ?

OpenSocial & Facebook Developer Meet in Bangalore

We are conducting an OpenSocial/Facebook developer meet in Bangalore. If you are interested in learning more about any of these technologies, please feel free to participate.

The details are available here:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/807031

Don't forget to confirm your participation beforehand.

Will OpenSocial replace existing portal standards ?

Going by the current trend it seems that OpenSocial might replace current server side portal standards like Portlets and WSRP for good. OpenSocial gadgets can be considered the Web 2.0 equivalent of portlets

While portlets are server-side components that depend on aggregation at the server, OpenSocial gadgets are lightweight, javascript/DHTML/Ajax components that aggregate on the client (i.e the web browser). Portlets are expected to be deployed and maintained by administrators whereas OpenSocial gadgets can be pulled, on the fly, from just about any given source. And there is nothing much that you can do with portlets that cannot be done with a OpenSocial gadget and a servlet backend.

Time to say goodbye to all Portal Servers out there ?

OpenSoShell - OpenSocial developer tool

OpenSoShell is a tiny open social gadget that can help developers run OpenSocial
Javascript API snippets directly within an opensocial container like Orkut or Hi5.
It is not meant to be a full fledged IDE or development environment. But it can help complement existing gadget development tools like Firebug.

I have released it with an Apache license. Feel free to give it a shot.

http://portalzone.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/opensocial/opensoshell/opensoshell.xml

Update:
Here is how you can get started. Signup for an orkut account and request for sandbox access.Install the gadget by pointing to the URL from the the "My Applications" page.
You can find detailed instructions here: Orkut Developer Guide

You can also check out the video tutorial series.

Apache Shindig

Apache Shindig is an open source OpenSocial container. It is possible that Shindig ends up being the reference implementation for OpenSocial.

This does not seem to be related to the other Apache Portals projects at all, which is quite surprising.

OpenSocial

Been playing around with the OpenSocial APIs. While the promise of OpenSocial is impressive, the current release is premature and buggy. If you are a developer planning to get your hands dirty, I would recommend that you give it a little more time.

If you are a portal vendor, this is a space you need to watch out. I'd expect most portal servers to support the OpenSocial APIs at some point.