Products

This one has been a long time coming. Back in 2003, I blogged about how it would be really cool now that ColdFusion was built on top of Java for ColdFusion to support the portlet specifications outlined in JSR 168 & 170. I was really hoping they would release something for ColdFusion that made this as easy as wrapping code with a custom tag, or invoking a CFC. I also heard rumors that Macromedia had created a proof of concept for this at the request of a customer, but nothing was ever released.

As time went on, I shifted away from looking at a commercial portal (WebSphere) as a solution for some problems we were trying to solve, but I still keep an eye on developments in that space, as I never know when things may change and I could find myself looking at portals again.

All of this brings me to the point of this post. It looks like Adobe has released a proof of concept Portlet Toolkit for IBM Websphere and ColdFusion!

From the Adobe Labs website:

"The ColdFusion Portlet Toolkit is a proof-of-concept library that allows you to use ColdFusion as a Portal Application within an IBM WebSphere Portal Server (WSPS version 5 and greater). A Portal Application can serve several different portlets. Every portlet you deploy will run inside the same ColdFusion Portal Application. This toolkit provides one concrete Portlet called CFCPortlet. This Portlet simply passes the requests on to the ColdFusion server. The ColdFusion then invokes CFC methods to render the Portlet, and to perform actions. You can deploy several instances of this Portlet on your Portal Server. The setting cfcName defines which CFC will be used to marshal the Portlet events."

I think this opens up a lot of cool possibilities for ColdFusion developers working at companies who have also deployed Websphere portals. Although this release is Websphere specific, I would think it wouldn't be that difficult for Adobe to port the library for other portal implementations (like Apache Jetspeed). Now I just wish I had a Websphere portal so I could play with this thing!