Talking about business, how Senselogic has thrived, Rickard explains that "For us it has been a relatively simple recipe: listen to customers, understand their needs, use networks".
On technology choices, Rickard is "infinitely pleased" that they adopted AOP for their core architecture, but they had to implement their own framework due to lack of any other viable choices at the time. Interestingly, he also says that there are "still are no good contenders out there today".
Senselogic also saw reasonable succcess using PicoContainer as their component container but ran into some of it's limitations. "...its 'everyone sees everything' approach doesn't really work well when you have lots and lots of components."
Rickard also takes a firm stance on the benefits of using LDAP directories for account management, claiming that they simply do it much better than in-house solutions. "I see very few reasons why anyone would want to build an application today that has a custom user management that is not a LDAP directory."
From his experience building a Portal/CMS product, Rickard assets WSRP's and security integration technologies:
It is curious to read forums where people bash things like portlets and WSRP and XACML and such.Why would we want to run portlets in two servers? My Struts app works just fine on one Tomcat instance.Amazing. When you have been exposed to real-life DMZ environments a couple of times you start to wonder how the heck we get anything done *without* stuff like WSRP and security integration specifications like XACML and SAML.
On the Portal/CMS market, Rickard notes that you need a product that is both a Portal and a CMS if you a website that with content and app integration; however, most products today are either focused on being a CMS solution, or a portal solution. However, since Senselogic's product SiteVision implements CMS functionality as portlets, it operates in both worlds.
Full version: Thoughts on Senselogic and SiteVision.