Sun, Oracle, IBM Among Vendors To Support New Portal Standard

Sun IBM

The Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standard will be supported in new toolkits from Sun and Oracle debuting next week, said a source familiar with the plans. "They want people to build portlets using Java technologies--EJBs and servlets--all around this new standard," said a source who has been briefed.

JSR 168 was announced into the JCP in January and is supported by ATG, BEA, Broadvision, IBM, Iona, Oracle, SAP and Sun among the portal players, as well as tools vendors such as Borland, Bowstreet and Macromedia.

Adam Abramski, product marketing manager for portal services for Sun's iPlanet division, said JSR 168 aims to standardize how data, information, applications and syndicated content are aggregated to portals. The final spec is due at the end of the year, with the first JSR 168-compliant implementations slated to appear in the first half of next year, he said.

Abramski also said Sun is adding support for the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) in the iPlanet portal. The JCA is a standard for connecting Java applications to legacy applications and is increasingly being supported in platforms built on Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

"We're supporting any third-party JCA connector within the portal to gain access to back-end legacy and ERP systems, and to make that data in the back-end available as a portlet," said Abramski.

Increasingly, portals will have to access diverse back-end systems, acting as de facto EAI platform, observers said.

Next week, Sun also will announce an updated version of its iPlanet Integration Server 3.0 that adds support for importing WSDL data and promises to enable developers to build portals with little or no coding, said David Hearn, director of product marketing for Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) business integration.

Oracle will also unveil a migration kit to help customers move from BEA to Oracle 9i Application Server (9iAS). Some observers said Oracle has had success pushing 9iAS into its existing database customer base.

"If you buy JDeveloper, you get the app server, if you buy Oracle apps, you get the app server. You just get it. They're pushing it hard and have improved the product quite a bit. Oracle is good at scalability, clustering and caching because of their database experience," said one analyst.

On Oracle's third-quarter earnings call, CFO Jeff Henley highlighted application server momentum in particular, which stood out among otherwise bad news about Oracle database and application sales for that period. "The one bright spot continues to be the application server, which grew at 35 percent. We have had three very strong quarters of growth [for Oracle 9iAS," Henley said.