Portal 2.0: Beyond Widgets and Portlets
Brian Chan Liferay
The first generation of portals from 2000-2005 have become the unloved children of enterprise software. Not quite infrastructure and yet without the immediate ROI of applications, portals garnered a bad reputation for being investment-heavy with little return. Meanwhile, in the last 2-3 years, all manner of new-fangled technologies with many portal-like characteristics have become the new darlings of the industry, including mashup servers, collaboration platforms, lightweight social software and widget frameworks. Enter the second generation of portal servers, which have grown up. Despite the industry’s misconceptions, portal technology is still often the most natural fit for enterprises that need web-based applications targeting a variety of audiences. Portals have naturally evolved to embrace new developments in social collaborative software for the enterprise and are once again strong contenders for delivering results and immediate usability. What’s more, portals continue to enjoy their traditional advantages in enterprise integration, user management, presentation layer aggregation, and service oriented architecture, which are shortcomings of the newer lightweight technologies.
Essence & Ceremony
Neville Roy Singham ThoughtworksNeal Ford ThoughtWorks
The debate over static vs. dynamic languages is really a red herring: it should be about essence vs. ceremony. This keynote illustrates the origins of these concepts, what they mean to modern software development, and why everyone is interested in dynamic languages all of a sudden. I also delve into what kind of projects are best suited for dynamic languages, how to convince manager-types about risk vs. reward, and what it will take for consideration as first class citizens in the "Enterprise" world. And some stories.