Are Portal Servers dead?
Several years ago I was a big fan of Portal Servers (in particular for internal use), and I thought that were going to take off as the standard for public-facing sites (in particular with the release of JSR 168). This however has never eventuated. I have therefore been asking the question for the past few years of whether the use of Portal Server technologies for public-facing sites is worthwhile, and if so for what sites (or subsets thereof). I am not questioning that the business concept of B2C, B2B, B2E, etc. portals is required, but rather whether the technology platform of Portal Servers for public-facing sites is overkill. Portal Servers typically perform a number of primary functions (but there are other alternatives), some of which an organisation may not care about: Integration with Authentication / Authorisation framework Templating Personalisation Facilitate application/portlet reuse In-context content management Analytics & Reporting Search Ability to delegate control o...