bryanmills.net

My employer has had me looking at IBM Portal solution for the past few weeks and I’ve been thoroughly disgusted. The major problems are install, configuration, and development. First the portal solution requires IBM Websphere which like most application servers consume the entire machine although I believe Websphere to one of the biggest pigs. Also the portal software “recommends DB2″ again another monster application. This makes development on any ordinary hardware impossible. My machine can barely launch Mozilla when the server is running. Also one of the major applications my company is interested in is Lotus Sametime which doesn’t run on Linux (sigh). Interesting considering IBMs strong move toward Linux as a supported operating system.

Because of my hatred towards IBM’s portal software I started looking at alternatives. The problem with the portal software is all of it has quirky behaviors. I started looking a the Apache project Jetspeed which is what IBM based their portal solution off of. Jetspeed is an extremely small portal solution and can be up and running in a short hour. The problem is that they are still in beta versions and it needs some work on its portlet deployment engine and a few other areas where IBM did help the product.

The reason Jetspeed is so small is because it doesn’t require any fancy EJBs it runs as a simple servlet service. I have Jetspeed running in Tomcat and using MySql database. It took a little playing with configuration files to get it running outside of Hypersonic, which is the default database. I am in the process of trying to setup a pseudo development environment so I can write some porlets. I can do this manually but I’m trying to figure out the best way to automate the development process.

Once I get my environment a little more stable I’ll make it publicly available.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 24th, 2003 at 11:33 am and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.