Yash Technologies has announced the release of the commercial SyncEx portlet suite, containing portlets for integration of MS Exchange-based emails, contacts, appointments, and tasks into JSR-168 compatible portals.

Also available is an API for integration of custom business requirements with Exchange.

One of the authors (Punit Pandey, when making the announcement of SyncEx) comments on the dearth of JSR-168 portlet suites, even while many vendors indicate there are many collections of portlets. Which are the portlets you use, and where can they be found?

Hi Joseph,

First of all, good to see reference of my blog here.

While quoting the dearth of portlets, I really mean it. While looking for JSR 168 portlets, it is really difficult to recall even few good names. I have seen frequent requests for JSR 168 portlets in our portlets forum (with around 4000 members) but without many positive responses. We are also running one free portlets repository but without enough good portlets.

It would be really good to get opinion of other community members.

Punit Pandey
http://portlets.blogspot.com

Cool. Does it support Sun Java System Portal ?

Cool. Does it support Sun Java System Portal ?

Being 100% JSR 168 compliant, you will soon see our announcement of SyncEx Collaboration Portlets for all JSR 168 compliant portals (big or small) including Sun, JBoss, Jetspeed, Stringbean, Vigneete, and uPortal etc. See our website www.SyncEx.com for further information. We have already tested our portlets with most of above servers and just giving finishing touch.

First of all I would like to congrats Punit and Yash technologies for coming out with JSR 168 compliant portlet suite.
I agree with Punit regarding the lack of JSR 168 portlets in the market. There has been many initiatives to develop and share JSR 168 portlets, but with no success.

Though there are few collaborative portlets which Portals provide, for example, Liferay's mail portlet but they are not really JSR 168 compliant.

Shishank
http://goshishank.blogspot.com

Does that make it a pooplet?

Cogix has been shipping a JSR168 portlet for nearly a year. The portlet is adapted to the community preferences available in Websphere and Vignette and emulates them in other portals. It runs on all popular portals. Visit www.cogix.com.

One of the authors (Punit Pandey, when making the announcement of SyncEx) comments on the dearth of JSR-168 portlet suites, even while many vendors indicate there are many collections of portlets. Which are the portlets you use, and where can they be found?

I agree. Most of the time, all you get is portlets that do simple things - iframe portlet, JSP Portlet and so on. There are quite a few portlet sites (JBOSS portletswap, sourceforge etc) but i've never found any portlets that do any real work!

/a
http://apoorv.info

Congrats to Yash and Punit for this very useful set of portlets that were tested on eXo from the early development stages :)

Actually we proposed them to several of our customers that were wory after Compoze being bought by BEA and they all like them so far. Even if you already have your own groupware portlets, you can use the SyncEx API to sync your datas from your portlets to Exchange.

Integration to Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes are critical pieces of software when making an application/integration portal project.

So once again congratulation to SyncEx team from the eXo Platform team!

Benjamin

JSR 168 is still in its infancy. The amount of effort involved in writting anything of significance makes it highly unattractive. It almost feels like the dark ages when the servlets and the configuration files were written by hand.

I think that jsr 168 is going to take a lot of time to get to the place where servlet specifications currently are. Till that the time the best option remains to write using custom apis and exposing them as consumable portlets using WSRP.

I cant think of a good reason to write JSR 168 stuff.

anand

JSR 168 is still in its infancy. The amount of effort involved in writting anything of significance makes it highly unattractive. It almost feels like the dark ages when the servlets and the configuration files were written by hand.I think that jsr 168 is going to take a lot of time to get to the place where servlet specifications currently are. Till that the time the best option remains to write using custom apis and exposing them as consumable portlets using WSRP. I cant think of a good reason to write JSR 168 stuff. anand

I think the cross-platform possibilities are a good reason. Also, I don't really think the spec is in the dark ages. Sure, it could use some work, but as long as you use a web framework that supports portlets (like Struts, JSF, Tapestry and Webwork), you get rid of a lot of the headaches.

Kito D. Mann (kmann at virtua dot com)
Principal Consultant, Virtua, Inc. (http://www.virtua.com) Author, JavaServer Faces in Action
http://www.JSFCentral.com - JavaServer Faces FAQ, news, and info

The SyncEx portlets are fully compatible with Liferay.

See http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads/community_portlets

and http://www.syncex.com/

I updated the portlet links in the Javapedia: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javapedia/Portlet

Yash is one of teh biggest bodyshops around and due to the recent law chnages requiring to have product offering , hence we see this dummy products