DIY Software as a Service

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Dev2Dev Editor's Blog | January 29, 2007   3:17 AM | Comments (0)

I've been learning a little more about Software as a Service, or SaaS as the Technorati users affectionately call it. At its heart, SaaS is about a software delivery model—you, a software company, host the software for some remote client, and provide upgrades, maintenance, persistence etc. on their behalf. On-demand software, if you like.

Having recently read Drew's Guidelines for Writing JSR-168 Portlets, it struck me (rather late in the game) that having a strong interoperability standard such as JSR 168 (or the upcoming JSR 26886) and a healthy market of interoperable portlet suites, that application service providers can rather easily create their own SaaS suites. Of course, you'd need a pretty good application server and portal, with pretty good security and persistence solutions, but we know those exist ;-) What's more, the integration of things like JSR 188 and SIP for telephony integration seem to make this even more compelling.

So, is there a wellspring of DIY SaaS providers out there, using industry portal solutions and portlet suites? Do we have enough, in terms of portlet diversity, CMS integration etc. to do this sort of thing? Are our portlets flexible enough (and here I'm thinking of Apex for example) to provide user-customizable solutions?

In the Articles we have Guidelines for Writing JSR-168 Portlets. JSR-168 is a collection of Java APIs for portlet developers. In this tutorial, Drew Varner shares some best practices for developing JSR-168 portlets for portability.

In CodeShare News, Jeremy tells us about Community Provides Quality SIP Server Examples. He points out a number of new code samples for WebLogic SIP Server and one for WebLogic Portal's Behavior Tracking capabilities. Finally, he points to Gerald's, contentlinkmanagementsystem project for WebLogic Portal that does some magic link redirection for links embedded in documents.

In the Blogs Chris Hogue provides an Workshop 9.2 performance trick, essentially switching off a builder.

Mariano Benitez blogged in Anyone saw my business? about how applications "that implements business logic should be expressed as close as the way business owners express them as possible." (Mariano's article Business Process Management (BPM) For The Masses is worth a read too.)

Ian Goldstein blogs about Preemptive Support, briefly describing Guardian, what signatures are, and pointing to the Guardian signature sweepstakes (with it's Ducati prize ;-)). If you're interested in this, check out our article BEA Guardian: A New Model of Pre-Emptive Support.

Finally, Peter Laird's WebLogic Portal Propagation Tool Field Guide seems to have generated a lot of interest.

From our Event Calendar we have the following upcoming events:

• EJB3 Java Persistence API: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Webinar, Feb 1)
• Backbase Ajax and BEA Workshop Studio (Webinar, Feb 7)
• Taking Fine-Grained Authorization Deeper into the Enterprise (Webinar, Feb 13)
• Delivering on Web 2.0 with WebLogic Portal and Ajax(Webinar, Feb 14)
• Leveraging SCA to Implement Next Generation SOA (Webinar, Feb 28)

The Dev2Dev Live! archive we are (still) featuring two items:

• Building Federated Portals in BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2
• Enterprise Mashups with WebLogic Portal 9.2

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Technorati Tags: saas, weblogic, portals, JSR168

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