WebSphere Portal 7 is currently in its Beta release, so if you want to get a quick peek at IBM's latest flagship software, it's out there for the viewing.

Of course, an even better way to get the scoop on IBM's WebSphere Portal 7 release would be to hang around TheServerSide.com and read Sal Pece's soon-to-come, multi-part series, on IBM WebSphere Portal 7 installation, development and administration.

IBM WebSphere Portal 7 Beta Release

New features introduced in the Portal Beta 3 release of WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management include:

*** Tagging allows users (and entire user communities) to classify, organize and structure content autonomously. It can add valuable meta-information and even lightweight semantics and allows non-expert users to develop folksonomies that categorize content available in the system.Rating allows users to vote for the popularity of portal content and helps other users to quickly identify hot items

*** Virtual resources based security concepts to control which and how users and groups can tag and rate

*** Full xmlaccess support for tagging and rating

*** Powerful APIs to create, delete, update and query tags and ratings

*** Lotus Web Content Management enhancements including: content model simplified by merging Sites and Site Areas, enhanced workflow model providing support for Bi-directional workflow traversal, and taxonomy driven option selection element

*** Extend and integrate Lotus Web Content Management with external applications via Java Messaging (JMS)

IBM WebSphere Portal 7 Beta Release

i better stay far away from it.

I developed on WASPortal 6.0/6.1 for two years. I hated it. So did the rest of my 16+ developer team.

We spent more time waiting for WAS/Portal to start and restart, than actually writing code. We were very unproductive, but management didn't listen, because they weren't the ones in the trenches fighting with the PC.

Portlet development is not suitable for web applications, but more for web content presentation.

We could have been more productive using Spring/Tomcat (or Jetty)/Ajax/Rest.

Management should stop listening to IBM marketing and sales rep and start listening to developers in the trenches.

The WebSphere Portal Test Environment was a total joke, I agree. Even with top of the line computers, a program with more than just a handful of portlets would take ten minutes to start, and almost as long to test a portlet or two, and then stop it. I completely agree.

I often bought a computer of my own exclusively for testing - just dedicated to the WTE, but it was still garbage.

I would often just test using JetSpeet or Pluto, but that darn WTE was peculiar enough that something that worked in JetSpeed would mess up on the portal, so that was only half a solution.

I agree, testing in the old version was a nightmare. Here's hoping that they've come up with something more developer-friendly.

Given that *Anything* with IBM Websphere in their name is glacially slow, i often wondered how many monkeys are sitting any how many computers back at IBM when they try and put it all together for some integration testing. This must be one of the main problems that has lead to WS being so far behind in terms of catching up to the latest JEE specs. I wonder how they get around this problem, pr maybe they dont and a 1000 monkeys at a 1000 computers eventually get the job done aftger a 1000 days.