[Zope-CMF] CMFPortlets (was Re: [Zope] Re: plone "vs." CMF was ... uPortal??)

[Ausum Studio]

I started to write a skin to handle portlets (or channels) a while ago.
After this thead I decided to show a preview. It still needs more work to
become a product, although there's a couple of screenshots and a demo (no
released files yet). Any feedback is welcomed:

http://www.zope.org/Members/ausum/CMFPortlets/Preview



Ausum



----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Browning" <paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk>
To: "zope" <zope@zope.org>
Cc: "Andy McKay" <andy@agmweb.ca>
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: [Zope] Re: plone "vs." CMF was ... uPortal??


>
>
> --On 29 September 2002 08:09 -0700 Andy McKay <andy@agmweb.ca> wrote:
>
> >> Quite. I don't know much/enough about the CMF but I'm sure this
> >> is all do-able. But if uPortal have already invented that wheel ....
> >
> > This is somewhere in the list of things to do (i've already done it as a
> > prototype at aspn.activestate.com), I've never thought it that useful or
> > used it myself on sites that do serve it. Do you think its that useful?
>
> Well if "it" is the channel/portlet concept as expressed by uPortal/Oracle
> Portal then, yes, I think it's essential. See Dario's helpful post
> on why he finds the channel concept attractive.
>
> If Zope +/- CMF had this now then it might be more competitive in
> the portal framework space. Funny that the CMF started life as
> the PTK .....
>
> Please don't think I'm jettisoning the CMF as it stands as a portal
> framework. I think we're starting to understand that there are
> portals and portals.
>
> The CMF may be perfect for building a portal for a community or
> small organisation that has no legacy of back-end information
> systems. This sort of portal will host alot of content.
>
> But, as the recent META Group report
> <http://www.zopezen.org/Members/Ausum/1033036454>
> notes, for larger organisations the focus is now on "employee
> portals" (for universities read "students and staff") as
> they try to evolve from the "intranet stage" of their IT
> evolution. In "employee portals" all the content may be
> elsewhere - back-end information systems - and so the
> focus is on semaless integration and application delivery.
>
> This is where you want the channels; to aggregate (and skin)
> remote and heterogeneous applications. The portal framework
> also ideally gives the illusion of single-sign on (various trust
> relationships being set up between systems).
>
> To build such a portal framework seems a non-trivial
> task. Which is why I'm inclined to say "ok, so uPortal
> have done it, it's open source too, it's very
> standards centric, so let's run with that".
>
> As Dario notes, as well as its content management strengths,
> Zope seems perfect for building smaller applications quickly,
> and so perhaps we should be looking to plug these in to an
> overarching (Java-based) portal framework as channels.
>
> I've done this a proof of concept (using a Zope-hosted
> RSS app) which I then pointed at uPortal (RSS is one
> the channels that comes out of the box). But we need
> to extend this to apps that require authentication and
> session information to passed back and forth (and
> stored). Which is why I'm trawling for potential
> collaborators on this!
>
> Thanks for reading this far,
>
> Paul
>
> --
>  The Library, Tyndall Avenue, Univ. of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1TJ, UK
>    E-mail: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk  URL: http://www.bris.ac.uk/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Zope maillist  -  Zope@zope.org
> http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope
> **   No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
> (Related lists -
>  http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
>  http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
>