Talk:Web portal/Archive 1

Inadequate article?
As someone who is shopping for, and consequently bewildered by, web portal software on the less than corporate enterprise level, I find this article inadequate in that it does not address this wide array of software that is out there, nor is there a link or disambiguation (Word is too complex) to these other forms (soopportal.org, web wiz forums, maxwebportal extreme, etc) of web portal. I would glady do an article myself, but clearly I'm not ready. I, and I suspect others, need someone more knowledgeable to at least start the ball rolling here. Please? Thanx. :-)Natcolley 18:54, 19 October 2005 (UTC) (database) that will drive all the processes (paperwork).
 * - If the Portal is accessible using only a web browser, the company could save millions of dollars because they would never need client/server software... just browsers.
 * - I've used the Portal is a House speech many times... let me know if it helps you better understand. Gifford Watkins (talk) 11:31, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Criticisms
It would be nice to have a criticisms section for this article (and most articles on Wikipedia in general), from both the POV of the end user, and the POV of startups that have ideas that should be independent of portals but which are bought out by portals.Biturica (talk) 14:40, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. there was a reason that portals fell from favour, and I was rather hoping that this page could offer me some links to analysis around this. Dkernohan (talk) 09:02, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

not neutral: Java centric.
This is a well written articlns of it should be in a links section or an example section. Peter 13:13, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I find no point-of-view asserted here. Please see NPOV regarding the use of the  tag.  If it being Java centric is concerned, then I invite you to expand the article to cover portals made in other languages.  Thanks! -- Perfecto [[Image:Flag_of_Canada.svg|25px|Canada]] 01:34, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
 * If the no point-of-view policy is about unbiased articles, then your correction is not good. The article is biased towards only one technology, implying that a web portal can only be made from Java technologies. The article should be language neutral in defining what a portal is. I will take you up on your invitation and see if I can write something acceptable. I know it is not an easy thing. I will see about it over the weekend.-- Peter 13:07, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm a Portal Software developer. Any room for my opinion? Ok great... perhaps Portals ought to be defined by the cultures they create? Gifford Watkins (talk) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Official statement from a student of Jakob Nielsen
Well, what about the fact that a Wiki can be a small part of a portal? Gifford Watkins (talk) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
 * A 'portal' refers to a location on the World Wide Web while a 'Wikiportal' should refer to 'Wikiportals' here on Wikipedia. The 'portal' use confuses users.  Let us clarify this as soon as possible.  I suggest 'portal' designers begin their conversion to 'wikiportal' immediately.  I should know.  Like Al Gore, I built the Internet. Ha! Anyway, I have started the switch to Wikiportals with the new Central Intelligence Agency Wikiportal which you can find here Sincerely, CelebritySecurity 22:39, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Vortal?
Vortal redirects here. What is a vortal? The word doesn't occur here even though it redirects here. RJFJR 17:11, 11 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Vortal was, for a short time in the 90s, used to describe a "vertical portal". I don't know if any of those still exists, but the idea was to gather links to businesses in a certain field and maybe let them share information with each other. --Busifer 13:44, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Try this link to an explanation of Vortals... What is a Vortal?...Gifford Watkins (talk) 11:24, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Here's another link...  Scottnelsonsmith (talk) 19:46, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

citation
There's only one citation (Bauer, H. H., M. Hammerschmidt, and T. Falk) -- should I presume that the citation was the source of this information?

"Some corporate analysts have predicted that corporate intranet Web portal spending will be one of the top five areas for growth in the Internet technologies sector during the first decade of the 21st century."

There's Web Portals -- generic term for a type of web application -- and there's Portal Servers, which is a type of enterprise software meant to help set up websites that are Web Portals. I am thinking these should be two different articles.

List of examples needed
I added a list of examples to the Web portal article because I do believe the article is missing examples. But someone reverted it. Why can't there be a list with examples?

I think it would be very helpful to people trying to understand what a web portal is, if they could see some examples of the kind of sites this article talks about. The list I added was a generic list, not adverticing any portal in specific. And I did try to be as objective as possible and list different kinds of portals (PHP, ASP and .Net).

I have also now read up on the policies that applies for editing since I thought I had done something wrong, and was wondering what that could be. And I found that to give some examples in the article to clarify what the article is about does not breake any rules or policies what so ever, so, when honest objective and correct editing isn't welcome, well then, this was my first and last edit and I truely couldn't care less if you block me because I will not visit this place again since it's obviously a waste of time.

MaggieJ 15:17, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree. Some mention should also be made of the web portal software, such as PHP-Nuke, which allows people to create a portal for their site. The relationship between web content management software and portals should be discussed (portals are often powered by CMS's). I dont want to write this - I have little experience of portal design not incoporating a CMS - wouldn't be NPOV, but if anyone has any suggestions? 12:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps instead of looking at the different types of technology powering Portals, we ought to be looking at the different cultures that revolve around portals. A portal could be defined by the type of 'culture' communicating under the digital roof of a Portal? For instance... Family WebPortals, Business Portals, Church Portals, Community Portals, etc. Gifford Watkins (talk) 11:23, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I cannot contribute to the discussion because I am trying to learn the terminology. What is the difference between a web portal and a search engine? I think examples might help a neophyte like me. That information is what I wanted from this article.Krenmas 01:38, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Well.. how about Wikipedia? I mean seriously. I think we have to be careful of not catering to one kind or brand of portal in this article. This is a summary article. An article on a specific kind of portal should have some examples perhaps. Alex Jackl 17:38, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

I have a whack of Intel powered DotNetNuke portals here... but I do this for a living... so folks might want to delete this... Gifford Watkins (talk) 16:52, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Toned down the advert-y nature of the NICUSA reference in the government articles.
Statements like " the most successful company in this area" do not belong in an an encyclopedia article unless their is lots of back source material and statistics. I also took out the funding model statements because that funding model is one of many (and there fore inappropriate to single out - again advertising) and would not work for many government portals like education for instance. (my area of expertise).

Happy to discuss this with anyone... Alex Jackl 17:42, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Corporate Portal and Enterprise Portal the same?
Reading this page I find the paragraph on Corporate Portal covers similar topics as the page on Enterprise portals. I suggest to replace Corporate Portal by Enterprise Portal and to condense the content of this article to a short introduction linking to the full page on enterprise portals. Also on the disambiguation page on Portals, the notion of web portal is linked with enterprise portal as a sub-notion and not Corporate Portal. Although we could consider and Enterprise Portal as one of the technology platform/component to enable a Corporate Portal... Regards Samsammy00 08:30, 4 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree!!! Alex Jackl 17:23, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

하나님 사랑해요 ♡
하나님 사랑합니다 ㅎㅎ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.121.226.17 (talk) 03:32, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Portals and such
Portals......they are just webpages. Why make things so "wordy". It's similar to when they came out with "e-furstructure" --Cincioh (talk) 18:39, 30 June 2008 (UTC)


 * From the point of view of an end-user you're right. A portal is just a website. However the technology behind the website is different. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.184.231.254 (talk) 08:50, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

First mention what is portal. Then you have to start about web portal. -

"If you want the other meaning of portal, click the disambiguation link near the title.

I agree that some of these topics, the 'Sportal' especially, sound just like a website. A traditional web portal offers more than just information and usually not so specific as to limit the types of media. You can only show so much about one sports team, unless they have lots of info, pics and vids, plus classifieds to sell memorabilia, offer @whateverteam.com email addresses, upcoming and season ticket sales and perhaps up to date weather in the cities they're playing. They'd have to have a lot of different things to get away with calling it a 'web portal' as compared to a website. Not to mention linking to the team's official and fan sites. After all a portal isn't a website, it's not supposed to have it's own opinion or any topical information.

Web portals typically either send you to other websites where you find the information or physical products that you want (vis-a-vis a search engine) or they take the info from other sites in the background and inject it into their page so it looks like they know everything (like file search and warez sites). Calling it a portal assumes that you are going through it to get data elsewhere." Cyrus40540057 (talk) 21:58, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Web porm other sites or sending people other sites. For example, educational portal - current students can use it to enroll in their classes, prospective students can use it to apply for admission, professors use it to push videos, notes, power points, and assignments out to the class. The study groups have messages boards where they can work on their projects. There is chat and private messaging to encourage collaboration. Badb (talk)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.119.81.135 (talk) 14:47, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Think. A web portal or an internet portal is a web page that contains a number of elements that may be desired in a "start page." Saying they are "just web pages" is like saying we shouldn't have a word processing page because that is just software... I am surprised that we can't simply describe the type of page that is classified as a web portal/internet portal (wow, no good single definition) and give examples and references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.67.84.24 (talk) 12:44, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Portal hosting references OK anywhere?
Is there an appropriate place in this or any similar web portal article to list links to hosting providers? Under External Links or the Hosted Portals section without having it considered as spam?

This article does not really define "portal"
I came to this page to find out what exactly a portal is. I'm in my early twenties, and did not start really using the Internet until relatively late in the game. I remember the word being thrown around by friends/parents' friends in the mid-nineties, but not what it refers to, and can never remember using one. From this article, I am only clear on what brands/corporations/services may or may not carry/have/be portals, and a portal timeline, but not what they are to begin with. Is anyone more clear on this that could improve on this aspect of the article? Viralhyena (talk) 06:33, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I have tried to clarify it in the opening sentences. Please review. Rp (talk) 09:39, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

vague, but widely used by management in IT, so first, improve SEE ALSO
SEE ALSO Enterprise Portal Intranet_portal

SEE ALSO should have Dashboard, Mashup, RIA, Web 2.0

There have been serious issues for those whose "portal" required Java browser plugin (2013) and near future for those who relied on Silverlight for an RIA-style portal. HOw hany large corps opted for AIR or JavaFX ?

My expertise was in Curl (www.curl.com) [ Java stack backend ] and Smalltalk (generating JavaScript) for portals spI will try to help clarify with historical examples from large US Fortune 200 corps and global Fortune 100's

G. Robert Shiplett 11:09, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

information from US corporate portal development experience
from my experience on the engineering side in insurance e-commerce, banking intranet portals, logistics, telecomm, Fortune 100 financials and medical-related financials :

The main concept is to present the user with a single web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers. For portals that present application functionality to the user, the portal server is in reality the front piece of a server configuration that includes some connectivity to the application server. For early web browsers permitting HTML frameset and iFrame elements, diverse information could be presented without violating the browser same-source security policy (relied upon to prevent a variety of cross-site security breaches.) More recent client-side technologies rely on JavaScript frameworks and libraries that rely on more recent web functionality such as async callbacks using HttpXMLRequests. A currently popular client-side library is jQuery. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one server-side example of how a portal can be used to deliver application server content and functionality. The application server or architecture performs the most of the crucial functions of the application. This application server is in turn connected to database servers, and may be part of a clustered server environment. High-capacity portal configurations may include load balancing strategies. SOAP, was one of the early XML-based protocols used for servers to communicate within such an architecture. Many such approaches still relied on a Java applet on the client-side or, more often, the extensive use of JavaScript on the client-side. Some servers used advanced programming paradigms to generate the JavaScript within the HTML to be rendered by the client browser or by a site-specific or task-specific browsers (the latter are more common in government agencies with military and security responsibilities.) While Java is now less often used with a browser plug-in, Java remains a major implementation language for complex server-side implementations of secure portal designs with heavy concurrent loads. Apache Tomcat with JBoss using JMS, JMX and related Java services are very common implementation elements. There is some indication of recent re-implementations and new designs moving from XML to JSON and from SQL to NoSQL implementations given successes achieved by Google and by Amazon. The interest in JavaScript may stem from work at Yahoo! which has not seen as much success, but which work can now be combined with Google's use of code inlining strategies which pre-date JavaScript in the Self alternative to StrongTalk, a second generation Smalltalk (both acquired by Sun at the time Netscape began innovating in LiveScript and other new browser features.) From an engineering history standpoint, some older ideas underly recent hot-topics such as node.js running on Google's V8 JavaScript engine or VM. It is noteworthy from an engineering standpoint that node.js was not originally implemented in JavaScript just as many server-side libraries were not implemented in Java. One of the most successful e-commerce sites generated cliet-side JavaScript using server-side Smalltalk and many mission-critical executive dashboards in Fortune 200 companies remain implemented in client-side MIT Curl for the Surge RTE browser plugin (although not widely reported in IT journalism and further obscured by recent corporate ISV acquisitions.) IBM's acquisition of iLog Rules is an example of a much older technology (Prolog) underlying some very advanced portals within vertical markets. Neither Apple nor Microsoft showed an interest in the Prolog language, so despite the advent of CLP, such engineering implementation options see little public attention in internet media reports. Similar issues pertain to Haskell projects and other less well-advertised implementations of advanced web portals and portlets in the financial and government sectors. Very often the implementation programmers are unaware of the engineering history relating, say, Ruby and Objective-C to Smalltalk or JavaScript to LiveScript and Self with the attendant risk of "re-inventing" if not the wheel, then, say, the inflated rubber tire on the wheel rim. Client-side developers often have no experience as server-side developers in languages such as C or in high-level alternative languages that are not often encountered in HTTP client implementations.

Engineering Section : request for cleanup
I hope that an experienced editor can retain some of the issues which I have tried to high-light from my experience.

"portal" was a buzzword par-excellance but the lack of information in this article was very striking .. expecially at a time when Google has dropped Reader and will soon drop iGoogle.

My view today is that matters will worsen before they improve : one major disappointment is the failure of "co-op" CS programmes to graduate software engineers who had practical experience with non-general use languages in a server context.

I often feel that recent CS graduates are like imaginary Modern Languages graduates who are unaware that classicists study Latin and Greek and who are themselves unable to speak a language other than English. When asked about Sanskrit they would look puzzled ... isn't that a "dead" language from Babylon?

Much of the ignorance is excusable where corporate secrecy kept implementation info out of IT industry rags ... but a single course in sociology of IT would reveal research methods to uncover this documented historical fact ( many documents are available under US Gov't Freedom of Information, for example.)

Failures are often under-reported in the press but can be studied in corporate filings and share-holder information.

The marketing effort to place the user homepage on a server rather than on the local device and the infrequent use of local servers on end-user devices should all be topics when assessing the transition from static web page to dynamic web page to portals/mashups/dashboards and Platform-as-a-Service.

There should be a section on the role of Perl on the server-side - easily as troubling a phenomenon as the prevalence of PHP for merely "dynamic" web content when viewed in terms of applied science and evidence-based decisions.

It may be that programmer/software developer/software engineer indifference to social science methods and economics is far more of an industry concern than previously acknowledged. Coders who believe that they know the "better" way to implement smart servers with the intended results have no obvious counter-part in applied science related to engineering, as in, say, surgical practice at the Cleveland Clinic or fighter-pilot training at TopGun.

Few areas of web history open to historical scrutiny are as rich in folly as the period of the "portal" buzzword, as "the cloud" is too recent, as is "The Semantic Web".

Technical parallels include the choice of CD encoding by Sony/Philips, the VHS/Beta and later the HD DVD format battles.

Front-wheel drive vehicles and high-bypass jet engines offer engineering comparisons for the sociology of technical innovation acceptance and design implementation information proliferation in applied sciences.

Irrationality in internet application design decisions does not attract the attention of folly in political and sporting decisions in spite of the attention to all three areas in the popular media. Internet standards "by committee" may be-revisted after HTML 5 settles post 2014 given the corporate members of critical committees.

G. Robert Shiplett 14:42, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

early failures in corporate mission-critical portals : the case of Microsoft claims for .NET
a history section may have to wait for historical documents to be released.

I was present for a few days of Redmond engineers presenting to our CIO for what would have been Microsoft's first big US corporate mission-critical complex web server implementation.

When the senior managers left, the head of engineering for .Net at Redmond quietly advised that we should realize that .NET was in fact not ready such such production use, and could we not use C# for a mere prototype instead of moving into design ?

A few years later at a very successful e-commerce corp, I watched the first .Net effort's failures to bring a mission-critical service on-line for a limited, restricted range of client users ... month after month after month ( the latest methodology for s/w dev being exercised.) I am yet to see any report of this particular phenomenon of "newer is better" and in the absence of any evidence concerning maintainability, reliability and stability. The grey-heads in IT were looking after the data with a COBOL back-end on the mainframe ;-). The system to be replaced remains in many ways "the more advanced" in terms of engineering but not in terms of marketing and "product releases" by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun.

Sun's failure to advance StrongTalk and Self has reverberated first in JavaScript and now in both Google V8 and in the most recent VM for a Smalltalk dialect. See also: Parrot VM and the plight of Ruby as a Smalltalk-knockoff; Objective-C and Apple.

Advances for Prolog such as Logtalk are generally unknown to students - even Master-level students required to do an AI course. The advent of CLP and PEG are among many curiosities in the lag between college content and business IT. The lag is even further exaggerated in implementations in areas such as hospital IT ( a sociological curiosity in its own right.)

The public perception of computing "high tech" is perhaps as far from historical reality as its perception of "Our Army" or "The Vatican" or "The Party" - a gap usually addressed by history and social science. See: some curious Siemens "high tech" computing solutions in "old-tech' implementations. G. Robert Shiplett 15:15, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Removal of "tools" and "sociological issues" sections
I'm sorry, G. Robert Shipplet, but I've "cleaned up" the "issues" you "highlighted": I removed them. My reasons are detailed in the edit comments. Among their many issues were being a) not sourced, b) opinion, c) original research, and c) not on topic for a page that is specifically about web portals. The "sociological issues" section was hideously biased too. I mean, seriously: "ruby and python 'programmers' who only know...", with "programmers" in quotes? "Programmer" is a job description, not a value judgement. I considered editing the sections down, and when I tried I realized that I couldn't salvage them.

The only way I could see these "issues" returning to this page, is if they were presented as a well-sourced case study about the failure of one particular web portal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.10.185.6 (talk) 05:57, 10 March 2014 (UTC)