JSR 286 - Too little , too late

Just noticed that the JSR 286 spec has been finally posted : JSR-286 Now Posted. As you can see, the Expert Group for this spec was formed in Dec 2005. And it has taken 2.5 years for the EG to iterate to the next version. Portlet 1.0 was released in 2003, 5 years back.

My personal opinion is that this technology has been delayed to almost a point of irrelevance. And it would be interesting to see if Portlet 2.0 will succeed to make an impact.

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.