Hot or Not: - Widgets in the Java portlet world

As a portlet fan at my company, I was wondering how the current widget hype affects the portlet market. As widgets, in my view, have the same principles as portlets we have been creating for years, I don't really saw why widgets became such a hyped thing in the blogosphere and beyond. Even Wordpress in which I wrote this has drag & drop widgets!

Most of all, widgets (or gadgets as Google calls them) can be easily installed by anyone; they are simple pieces of Javascript. You can install them on a drag & drop portal page, like you see here:

• www.netvibes.com
• www.google.com/ig
• www.pageflakes.com
• Open source: www.portaneo.com

This way you can rapidly build one or more pages showing you, in one simple view, all information you need: news, blog entries, new videos, new games, your top 10 new mails and so forth. You no longer have to check all the sites or download some clunky RSS reader.

Most these platforms allow you to put such a widget on your homepage by using a copy-paste of javascript directly in your HTML source. Theoretically you can build a page with a lot of functionality in a very short time.

When playing around with this, you immediately see that these components are all trivial functionalities. Importing some content, very simple interaction and show some pictures. But that is exactly the idea: using some very simple-to-install software to add a part of a (much) bigger functionality. For instance, a company can run a customer relationship management (CRM) system and expose the most active clients for you in a widget on your Google homepage.

Java portlets are in this same markets: exposing partial functionalities of bigger (bank-end) systems, like CRM systems, HRM systems and so on. So why didn't portlets get "bigger?" They have much less market potential than widgets have, as most portlets are deployed and created in enterprise environments. However, if widgets are so interesting, then one would expect portlets to have more potential than they currently are showing.

The scope of portlets is one of the main problems: portlets are usually enterprise; widgets are, mostly, completely not enterprise. Another problem is: there are many platforms to easily create and expose widgets as ASP services, while these are not there for portlets. Portlets remain in the realms of the enterprise dominated by BEA, IBM, Oracle and recently SAP and Redhat (JBoss). And, as a simple search will show; there are simply not many portlets readily available (commercial or non-commercial), while widgets there are thousands and thousands. [Editor's note: right on. Portlet repositories .. yeeick. We need portlet developers to start applying podiatric extremities to rear-ward facing surfaces of humans and writing down nomenclatures.]

However, the Java portlet market is heating up and changing because of widgets. Companies are getting more interested in delivering the widget promise companies by packaging, one way or the other, portlets as widgets and widgets in portlets. Companies are also learning from widget and web 2.0 hype to create tools which are much more user-friendly and more interesting for less enterprise-savvy developers.

One of the enterprise companies moving into this space is Kapowtech which has been creating tools to build portlets on different platforms for a long time already. With their new platform OpenKapow they try to capture the mash-up and widget hype with the exact tools they sell to build portlets.

The bigger boys also feel the heat. Take, for instance, BEA systems, a big portlet compatible tool and platform developer is building and selling tools already for this heated market of mash-ups, widgets and (enterprise) portlets.

Widgets have a lot of promise I think, but not in their current form. You really want security and authentication looked after by a solid enterprise platform, as most companies run their in-house systems completely seperated from the evil internet. Portlets have a much better security status while widgets don't have any at all apparently.

A company trying to addressing this problem and, in the process, meshes the platform is small enterprise software developer Componence.com who did not only create a flurry of commercial portlets, but also built a drag & drop site manager like the above mentioned widget homepages and a portlet to select and use widgets, picked from thousands available on Pageflakes, Google, Netvibes and others, in a portal.

How do you think the Java portlet and widget market will integrate further?

Interesting links:

• www.netvibes.com
• www.google.com/ig
• www.pageflakes.com
• Open source: www.portaneo.com
• www.kapowtech.com
• www.openkapow.com
• www.jboss.com
• www.beasys.com
• www.componence.com

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