[Zope] Re: plone "vs." CMF was ... uPortal??

[Paul Browning]

--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

--
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   E-mail: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk  URL: http://www.bris.ac.uk/