Taking Notez – Island Pond Consulting

This beta will be a welcome experience for developers seeking to offer a nimble client side experience. Clearly the direction of IBM is to increase the adoption of client side aggregation pioneered in the WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 update, refined in WebSphere Portal 7.0, and now, further evolved in WebSphere Portal 8 Beta 2.

First things first, get your hands on the beta by going to http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/pfwiki.nsf/dx/08072009024448PMWEBPZ3.htm
You will probably want to get your hands on the portal as well and my last post describes a Windows install if you are so inclined. (Don’t worry Linux geeks, there’s a mention of the Linux VMWare offering as well.)

What will you find when you begin to explore the new features? Here’s a brief laundry list with a promise from me to tell more shortly:

• Support for client side mobile web UI architecture
• Easier implementation of Dojo mobile
• Builders to integrate Filenet and Sharepoint

Interestingly, some of the features that focus on mobility appear to be ‘exclusive’; If you want to develop a multi-channel application you may find “the server-side page based mobile development support available in Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 to[sic] be more suitable for such development.”

Check out http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/pfwiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Web_Experience_Factory_8.0_Beta_One_Overview#Dojo+Mobile+and+Data+layout+templates for more details.