BEA pitches Web 2.0 theme for portals

With an upgrade to its portal software, BEA Systems on Monday is touting a Web 2.0 interactivity theme with the product able to expose portlets, which can be produced for use in mashup apps, to other applications. The company is set to announce BEA WebLogic Portal 10. Key to the product’s new portlet capabilities is support for REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services.

“We’ve added in WebLogic Portal the ability to produce portlets over REST that external Web applications can consume,” said Jay Simons, senior product marketing director at BEA. For example, a portlet that provides employee telephone search capabilities could be produced via REST, and another Web application could utilize it.

“The goal here [with REST] is to support a number of different extensibility points,” for a portal, Simons said.

Also featured as part of Web 2.0 capabilities is an improved AJAX-style (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) framework for building rich experiences for the Web. The portal desktop can be updated dynamically through AJAX.

Support of the WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) 2.0 specification in the product provides for portlet-to-portlet communication and dynamic refreshing. New tools are provided in version 10 for portal management and governance.

A user of an earlier version of BEA’s portal software expressed interest in the new product’s AJAX capabilities.

“The main benefit would be an enhanced user experience and performance. That’s really what, in my mind, it does best,” said Michael Mainiero, Web director at NYU Medical Center, which uses BEA’s portal software for such applications as student and research portals.

Although Java provides the same capabilities as AJAX, AJAX provides a smoother interface, he said.

Integration between portlets also caught Mainiero’s attention. It could be beneficial to have portlets communicate with each other, he said.

BEA WebLogic Portal requires the use of BEA’s WebLogic Server Java application server. The portal software also functions with the BEA WebLogic Workshop development tool.

BEA believes extensibility capabilities in its portal product provide an advantage over rival offerings from companies like IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. Available now, version 10 of WebLogic Portal costs $57,000 per CPU.

Also in the portal space on Monday, ClearApp plans to announce it is shipping QuickVision for IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0. Featured are capabilities for managing composite application performance.

ClearApp leverages portal visual layer mapping, called the Virtual Portal Desktop, to measure service levels in WebSphere Portal 6.0. With QuickVision, WebsSphere Portal users “will be able to see how their applications perform from the point of view of the way the pages are laid out by the portal,” said Chris Farrell ClearApps vice president of marketing.

Specific Web services calls back to the portal will be gauged for their impacts on application performance. ClearApp also is monitoring use of WSRP in WebSphere Portal 6.0.