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.

Portlet Tutorial - Deploying your first portlet to OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0

This post is a part of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) Tutorial series


At the time of this writing, only Sun seems to have a functional JSR 286 portlet container. Apache Pluto 2.0 is work in progress and I have been unsuccessful in running the Exo Portlet Container.


The OpenPortal portlet container is Sun Microsystem's implementation of the JSR 286 spec. Here is how you would deploy the Hello World portlet to this container.

Step 1 :

Get JDK 5 or greater: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

Step 2 :

Get the Glassfish Application Server or Tomcat
If you downloaded Glassfish, set it up first.

Step 3 :

Download the latest stable release of the portlet container.

Step 4 :

Follow the install instructions: Installing the Portlet Container

Step 5:

Start your server and access the portlet container at http://localhost:8080/portletdriver

Step 6:

Once you have the portlet container running, you will notice two tabs. A Portlets tab and an Admin tab.The Portlets tab helps view all the portlets currently deployed. The Admin tab is used to to deploy/undeploy portlets. You are most likely to see a blank page. This is because no portlets are deployed by default.

Click on the Admin tab and proceed to deploy the portlet.


















Once you click on deploy, the portlet is automatically deployed and configured. Click on the Portlets tab to now view the portlet.












You have successfully run your first portlet !