Portlets or Sharepoint Web parts OR Pageflakes

Question

We have a new requirement driven by user interface team to go with portal solution for our user interface with portlets just like iGoogle. Our enterprise architecture team is recommending Portal technology (JSR 168) and personally but I think it is over kill. After reviewing Pageflakes architecture I am wondering whether we can come up with a lightweight UI framework to accommodate this instead of going with portal technology. I would appreciate your kind advice.

Additional information:

It is a Java shop with heavy investment in Websphere suite.

Answer 1

Of course this depends on your requirements. In general I think portals are good if you want to use the features they provide out-of-the-box (like login, user/role management, cms, etc) and are prepared to spend some time in configuring/maintaining the system. Anyway the JSR-168 is quite old and limited, and you should use JSR-286 as basis instead.

You might also consider building a custom "portal". That could be done with JavaScript framework like JQuery, or if more comfortable using Java-only, a component framework like Vaadin. Then it is good to rely on the framework's APIs to define the UI fragments and use the modularization mechanisms they provide.

Cannot say much about the Pageflakes, but it seems like simple and nice framework for aggregating HTML content from different sources using Ajax.

As a summary I'd say: Portal, if want to use (in good and bad) the advanced features. Custom, if you want to have the control and only build a simple "dashboard".