Most business folk have had a common dream for years now; to assemble applications from small building blocks. This idea and that dream, in different forms, has been there for 40-50 years and has succeeded in different forms, but not yet how the business would like to see it (things like COM, DCOM, CORBA and before that a lot of more proprietary attempts by big integrators like Cap Gemini).

A lot of hype surrounding the web 2.5-3.0 and widgets is generated because of exactly this: none technical users being able to compose webpages from building blocks which are simple and easy to use. A bit too simple I think personally. In this article I present an overview of the current portlet niche market and the players. If I am forgetting anyone please let me know and I’ll add them.

Portlets can be used for the same purpose and the new portlet specification is making them more suitable for a bit more complex work. And even build entire sites and applications from them. Personally I have the most experience building content management systems from portlets, using BEA Weblogic Portal. For companies wanting to embark on the portlet journey, this should be an interesting read at least.

When looking for portlets, the platform they run on is important. For instance, JSR-168 portlets work on all portlet platforms, but there are proprietary hooks which are created because the spec does not yet have certain features. An important one is inter-portlet communication, which allows portlets to talk to each other and exchange data. Vendors like IBM and BEA have solutions for that built in their platform and the new portlet spec (which is not finished yet and can be found here) has a standard solution for it.

As I previously noted, there are not that many portlet vendors selling portlets that are actually worth using. There are a few that do though and they actually sell tools and portlets that can cut your development time and time to market big-time.

Before diving into the portlets on the market, I want to comment on the most difficult part of modern portal development: changing the layout to the wishes of the client. None of the portal platforms I used make it particularly easy to do something like that. And when working on projects with the big integrators of this world, this is actually an acute problem. On first sight, all portals and portlets are sold with demos like this or this or this. The commercial vendors do not have any demos online, but they are more or less the same. However, the client wants, usually, something like this. The mismatch is obvious and this is not because it is a demo only: it is a lot of work to create portals like this, allowing to drag & drop portlets, still creating a very solid corporate image. The only company I could find delivering this as default is Componence.com. Also note the URLs in the different demo and production portals: they are usually very non-SEO.

For this article I studied the following portlet and tool vendors:

• www.kapowtech.com
• www.cogix.com
• www.componence.com
• www.portletworks.com
• www.syncex.com

I have quite a lot (and good) experience with the Kapowtech.com products. Although they don’t deliver any portlets, they offer tools to create portlets from current web applications rapidly. They integrate nicely with existing tools and it is very possible to develop JSR-168, BEA portlets etc rapidly from existing applications, even if they are written in PHP, ASP(X), Java or Ruby. The graphical interface helps you to click & create most functionality for a portlet and the functionality which could not graphically created can be scripted with a quite simple but powerful scripting language. Although I am not a great fan of screen-scraping tools (and this is one), it gets the job done much faster than other solutions I have seen, making portlet development a breeze. If you have (advanced) applications you need portlets for and you don’t have experienced portlet developers, you might give this a go.

The package contains a client and a server and will set you back around $20k per CPU.

Cogix.com sells a poll/questionnaire product which is quite advanced at what it does. It allows you to make complex, multi-path (branches) questionnaires, quizzes and polls online. It has a well defined API, is scalable, fast and allows easy to use definition interface. If you are looking to add user interaction like this to your portals, this project is the way to go. However for very simple polls there are other solutions and at $3k per CPU this might be overkill.

Componence.com is, in this line-up the most content management oriented vendor. They offer portlets and tools to create a complete content managed site which works well and looks good. I have used their tools extensively in projects and they work well if you are looking to provide a client with drag & drop customizable project. Included is everything related to content management, for instance, they provide a portlet which rewrites URLs in a search engine optimized way (SEO). I have not seen this at any vendor or company, except in a JBoss project I did where the admin wrote more than 500 Apache mod_rewrite rules to fix those URLs. Which is not scalable, at all. The number of portlets is quite large as can be seen here and they spent much more time on layout, user friendliness and out-of-the-box look & feel than the competition; you can really build scalable, enterprise e-commerce solutions in weeks instead of months which don’t look like a toddler mis-used his crayons. If you are looking to build a good looking, scalable and customizable content management portlet solution, you want to check this out.

PortletSuite seems to be priced at about $30k/server, which includes the entire package with all portlets.

Portletworks.com has, behind Componence, the second largest offering in this list, but I find it more difficult to classify it. It is content management as they offer a blog/news item publisher, but most of their offering is focused on delivering aggregation of different RSS and financial feeds. They have integration with many popular tools and interfaces for achieving this making it a quite nice for companies with existing portals wanting to add weather, stocks and blogs. So it does what they say; Adding value to enterprise portals. The offering is prices at $5000/server, making it very suitable for running it in custom portals or portals based on the Componence stack.

Syncex.com created a copy of the now BEA owned Compoze.com suite for adding Mail, Calendar and Tasks to your portals based on Exchange, Lotus Notes or proprietary databases. BEA includes their own solution with Portal currently, so I never had the pleasure of using this suite, however I never encountered a client using it. We show these kind of portlets in marketing demos and clients like it, but when finally rolling out the portal, they usually do not use these kind of solutions but rather much simpler calendars like this on public sites and CRM specific (depending on the CRM used) in intranets.

No doubt I forgot companies and products and I am curious to learn about them, as we are looking for ways to speed up our development process. With some of the above tools and portlets, we cut our development speed of large websites and portlets to weeks instead of months. The license costs are higher, but that is easy to get back by spending much less of the (very expensive) working hours. This makes me believe there is something to be said for building sites out of these building blocks.

While talking to vendors and seeing their demos I dare to conclude that only a handful of companies are taking advantage of this great technology and that even less companies are building useful web solutions on it. I guess most IT departments want to build everything themselves and are not interested much in high-level re-use (they do re-use frameworks, but not high level stuff). And probably portlets and the information and demos on the web showing them off are much too technical and primitive.

I am very interested how everyone reading this thinks about it. Except from a Yahoo group about portlets, there is not much of a community there either.