Remembering the Future

Being able to bookmark places, pages and portlets is fundamental for many reasons beyond simple usabilty. At a first order, you were now able to paste a url in an instant message to co-workers so they could join you and see what you were looking at, at that moment. But also, almost overnight with this feature, many layers of complexity were shed in the portal framework.

Programmability in the web sense was immediately enabled, the portal became a composable platform and we were able to layer the Lotus Workplace offering on top of it. URIs give visibility to intermediaries and so things like caching (where we had cool technologies like Dynacache) were far more easily enabled. Similarly for logging and profiling the portal, we could use the same tools for processing logs as exist for regular web servers. We had new opportunities for pipelining and filter chains (to do transcoding if needed). We had more options for load balancing, we could decide to deal with remote portlets through iframe invocation rather than through complex protocols like WSRP. And so on...

Topics: REST | WebServices