Chris, I complete respect what you're saying about the far more important design, stability and usability of the portal, independent of the portlets. Let me clarify my post and perspective a bit. I suppose my post was geared more toward a view of the portal as a ready-to-run production environment for a large (social) web site. As more of a portal user than a core developer, I am very interested in the existing applications that a good portlet catalog could provide (from any author or vendor). In most reviews and remarks about many portals, and the promotional materials of some of the portal sites themselves, the issue of off-the-shelf portlet quantity and quality receives far more than a trivial mention. Like us, not everyone choosing an enterprise portal is a large enterprise, able to just crank out the code for a custom portlet to meet their needs. More often, they want to modify something that comes close to their requirements, and go from there. The jsr168 approach provides a huge step up from the wild, wild, west that is the open source portal world outside the JavaEE sphere. But the advantage of some of those products is a wide array of third party plug ins that can jump start many kinds of projects. I don't think it's a stretch to wonder if such a community of portlets could be fostered in the JavaEE world too. Liferay gets a lot of attention, mainly because of these available portlets, and it's what attracted us to it. From just a few weeks of experience in their forums, I can comfortably claim that this is what has motivated hundreds of other users, as well. My sense, however, is that JBoss Portal is a better architecture for our longer term goals, so I am eager to know much more about it. Presumably, the portlets we develop there will be reasonably portable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4099585#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...