Two days ago, with a colleague, we had an interesting discussion around the future of Entreprise Portals.
Today in a SOA, Services are consumed by consumers like Fat Clients (Lotus Notes for instance) or Thin Clients (via a Portal).
The arrival of Web2.0 technologies like Rich Internet Applications (RIA) like Google Calendar, Google Docs ect will puzzle this architecture.
At IBM we already have two examples with Project Zero and Websphere Business Spaces. A Portal product is than no more necessary for consuming and exposing services in a browser.
What becomes than the role of a Portal in the SOA ? Probably it becomes a provisionning and security platform for RIAs and Mashups. At the security level, it means offering an Identity and Access Management platform. At the provisionning level it becomes a place where you can search for a mashup, configure it and use it immediately.
To show you an example of what a website/portal can become with RIAs, you can compare my server side "Portal" http://www.jfdeclercq.com/ with a "RIA Portal" version of it : http://www.netvibes.com/jfdeclercq
If you start using Netvibes you will understand how you can mix content on your own page using Widgets. Those widgets contain their own application logic (Gmail, Google Notes, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook....). Netvibes doesn't own the widget's code like a traditional Websphere Portal would.
Therefore the future of Traditional Portals like Websphere Portal is to provision those kind of Widgets in a secure way.
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