In response to the need for standards post from Apoorv, my take is

Standards are meant for products features that are no longer niche. Once they become commodity, standards are just small note that the products are compliant for so and so standard.

If one looks, you no longer buy Application Server for Java v1.5 vs v1.6 compliant (a very minor issue). You buy products for reasons other then standards. That means - What sells and differentiates products from each other is the features ( proprietary), inroads made by the development tools, ease of those development tools, documentation available for products/tools, expertise available in the market for those tools, ease of development and so on. Now, one can develop j2ee app's for WAS using eclipse. But developing j2ee app's for Weblogic on eclipse is not free and easy. IBM has a WAS CE ed for getting you hooked onto the eclipse platform. Once hooked, only way is to move up to WAS v6.x

Further, if everything was standard, lot of us will be rendered useless. Remember Y2K was a migration exercise for the very reason that there were no standards and everybody made money.

WAS CE (Community Edition) is build upon Apache Geronimo. Now, IBM has released a red book on how to migrate the applications developed fro WAS CE ed to WAS V6.1 ed. It seems all along that was the plan - get you hooked on the free stuff and once hooked, you need to move up the ladder (WAS V6.1 in this case)and start the pay back time.

Overall, the migration steps are pretty straightforward. I like the chapter 3 and 5. Chapter deals with Migration Strategy. The same guidelines are applicable for any migrations. Chapter 5 deals about Common Migration Issues - which is kind of best practices when doing such things.

Check out the red book here.

Yahoo and Google have released their versions of mash up editors. Both are in Beta as all Web 2.0 sites are! Google is currently by invitation. I tried both for couple of days and my observations are

1. Yahoo has a superior User Interface with drag and drop capabilities and ability to wire the components - which is kind of cool. Any one with basic knowledge can get started and start creating mash ups. Google on the other hand provides more basic UI, but the ability to take things in your hand means more power and richer applications. Although this means it is really for the nerdies
   


2. Yahoo has a pre-defined set of components/operators which can be used in combination. I believe most of the simple mashups can be easily achieved throught the same. Google on the other hand allows you to write code (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) which effectively means you can create any look and feel for your mashup.


3. Yahoo gives an RSS/JSON feed your mashup which is kind of cool. Google is more of application mindset where you create visual mashup applications
   


You can check out some of the Yahoo Pipes here PCM News. What I did , googled for PCM related keywords, take their feed, mash them together, give a rating as per my need and generated a new feed.

There is another nice article on Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashups here.

Sounds unbelievable ! Read On.

The organization has been a .NET shop but now wants to implement the WebSphere Portal. Options - dump the entire .NET Team and hire a fresh set of WP programmers.
Or use the Mainsoft's Java EE for Portal Edition. It provides .NET extensions to WebSphere Portal, allowing you to create and deliver a complete front-end Service Oriented Architecture , with equal access to .NET and Java services.

Using a single sign-on, end users gain a personalized, role-based access to .NET and Java applications with consistent branding and navigation. In addition, business analysts can easily compose enterprise applications using .NET and Java components using WebSphere Portal's Application Templates and JSR 168 compliant Inter-Portlet Communications.

Check out the same here.

Read about one of the early adopters here.

WebSphere Portal offers users the option to personalize layout and contents of pages. On the other hand, as an administrator you might want to preserve the layout or contents of pages, or parts of pages, which for example reflect your corporate identitiy. This Tech Note describes how you can prevent the personalization of such portal pages by users.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technical format that allows online publishers to share and distribute their content to other websites or individual Internet users.

When a new article is posted or a change made to a webpage, RSS keeps track of the changes and delivers them to the subscriber. RSS feeds are most often attached to text, images, podcasts and video.

To create RSS feeds for your site, you have variety of options. Lets explore them.

First, there are the commercial/open source programs available that allow you to generate the feeds for your site. Popular among these are

1. RSS Builder
   
2. FeedForAll

then there are online services that can be used to generate feeds. Popular among these are

1. FeedXS
   
2. RSS Headliner

then next are the corporates that might want to build there own feed generation service embedded in their application. For such discerning folks, we have the ROME open source library. Check out the same here.
Here is the sample code where the feed is generated via a java program for your content.

Unit testing asynchronous applications like Ajax based applications has really been a pain area. With Ajax coming in, some of the Automated testing have been found lacking i n the same. The Google Web Toolkit noticed this and has come out with an approach to write JUnits for the your Ajax applications.

To see and understand, how you can write JUnits for Ajax applications, check out the following article here.

The documentation around the GWTTestCase class can be found here.

Another article talks about running JUnits for GWT in eclipse. Check out the same here.

User goes to a page and changes the state of a portlet A. The user then navigates to a different page and when you return to the initial page with portlet A, the state of that portlet is the same state as when you left the page (the changed state). One expect the portlet to return to its initial state when you return to the page.

Use the state preprocesor to revert to the initial state of the portlet. (The state preprocesor is originally designed for WML but can be used for HTML as well.)

To configure the WML state preprocessor, add the following two custom name/value property pairs to the WPStateManagerService (WebSphere® Application Server Admininstrative Console -> Resource Environment Providers -> WP StateManagerService -> Custom properties):

name = preprocessors
value = com.ibm.wps.state.preprocessors.selection
.StandardPortalSelectionImpl, com.ibm.wps.state
.preprocessors.wml.WmlPreProcessor

and

name = wmlpreprocessor.markups
value = html

Software company Once Technologies has released what it claims is the first browser-based Web 2.0 development platform as an open source project.

once:radix is a Rapid Application Development system for Intranet and eXtranet environments. It allows developers with only basic programming skills to create sophisticated enterprise-level applications.

The decision to release the software under an open source license will allow SMEs to access Web 2.0 technology; till now only available to large firms that could afford to employ specialist programmers and database designers.

once:radix delivers world-class performance through a combination of its own software and some of the world's best open-source solutions, including PostgreSQL, JasperReports, Mozilla and Apache projects.

The first distro is planned to be released on 7th August.