I’m generally pretty sceptical about any product pitch that begins “all you have to do is…”. Usually, it skates over a whole bunch of set-up that the demonstrator has done beforehand. So, knowing that it’s hard to integrate existing applications into a portal, I’ve been left pretty cold by the hype around Portal Web Application Integrator.
One of the projects I’m working on right now has a couple of external applications to integrate. There’s Moodle – a php-based virtual learning environment (they didn’t have those when I was a student but these days every University has one) – and there’s good old Lotus Connections. At this point someone’s thinking “what about the Lotus Connections portlet”, that’s the subject for a whole other post. So, anyway, I was left with iFrames and Web Application Integrator to choose between. So, with the hype of “just add a few lines of javascript to your webpage and your application is integrated with portal” in mind, we attacked the problem.
