mike.mainguy

I just took a look at Google app engine. I wrote a quick dirt CRUD application to see what it's all about. It can be found at http://findmysport.appspot.com/ . What amazes me is that it is python based... I wonder why google uses python so extensively. I've used it for a number of things and find it very useful, but it just doesn't seem to have the momentum in corporate america of the "big J". On the other hand, it has tremendous street cred and is embedded in tons of open source tools. I found an interesting writeup here: Python at Google (Greg Stein - SDForum) it looks like google architects from the ground up and the guys on the ground said "python works for us".

What's with portals? It seems like this is another "flash in the pan" technology that many people jumped into without any idea of how/why to use it. We're looking at using a portal to provide some web UI templating and document management, but we're finding the reuse potential of even a JSR168 portal is hampered by legacy technologies. The exciting thing is the ability of portlets to communicate with each other, the down side seems to be this is not a core portal capability (certainly not from a client side perspective). Some interesting reads are: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0703_wallaker/0703_wallaker.html http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Beyond-enterprise-portals--40497.aspx This latter link is a better statement of my problem.