[jboss-user] [JBoss Portal] - Re: Feedback wanted. Would you choose JB Portal again?

[chris.laprun@jboss.com]

"wheezer" wrote : 
  | 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.
  | 

Your points are valid. Then again, if you like Liferay's portlets (and presuming that they are JSR 168 compliant), what is preventing you from using these portlets in JBoss Portal? 

Another aspect is, with JBoss Portal 2.6, we are starting to integrate with non-JEE portals. You can for example very easily use Google widgets with a Portal page with support for other (NetVibes comes to mind) probably coming up...

Also, I often see this argument where people want to benefit from an open source community of portlets to modify and use in their projects. How is it though that these people rarely contribute their portlets back to the community? Hint: useful, reusable portlets take time and attention to develop. Most people write a custom solution and don't care about making it reusable. From my perspective, and that's only mine, the return on investment on open-source portlets is very low. First, it's not clear what portlets the community wants. Second, we would probably spend a significant amount of time developing them but they would probably not fit all users needs and the more generic we make them (to try to make them easier to reuse), the more time we would have to spend on them, also running the risk of making them more complex. What do we have to gain from doing this? Increased visibility in the community (which is great) and market share. But how much of this would translate to paying customers? Would it be enough to justify the time we spent on them as opposed to  working on the core product (which IS making us money)? Hard questions to answer...

A community doesn't build itself. It's a two way street... We provide an open repository http://labs.jboss.com/portletswap/ for portlets... It is not as great as it could be, and we are aware of that, but like most things, this takes time and, from my point of view, with seemingly low interest from the community, I'd currently rather spend that time on improving the Portal server.

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