In IT, it‘s never the right time to choose a software. Either a technology is too old, or it‘s too new or it‘s still in beta. But I think that November 2007 is a critical time to choose a portal platform.

I‘m not an expert on portal (as a former BEA employee I‘ve used Weblogic Portal but that was many years ago and things have changed) and I’ve been asked to short-list portal implementations. The first issue I have is with the version of the spec that the portal should implement. “JSR 168”: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 (Portlet V1.0) has been released in October 2003 and most of the portals implement it. But “JSR 286”: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 (Portlet V2.0) is nearly out. Same thing with the JSF bridging. The JSR 301(Portlet Bridge Specification for JavaServer Faces) is still in early draft but nearly there. Same thing happens with WSRP V1.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets) (August 2003) and the V2.0 still in draft 4.

It looks like portal specifications haven‘t changed much since 2003 (Portlet V1.0 and WSRP V1.0). And suddenly three specifications are nearly getting published (Portlet V2.0 and WSRP V2.0 and Portlet bridge for JSF).

What should I look into ? A JSR 168 implementation that would be obsolete really soon or a JSR 286 beta implementation that will be buggy ? The project will be using JSF and WebServices, so I need to take that into account. Any advices ? Any platform that you would recommend ? Is eXo Portal the only choice ?