As that has been already mentioned BEA has 2 portals: BEA WebLogic Portal and BEA Aqualogic Portal (Plumtree).
I am not that experience with BEA Weblogic but I do with Aqualogic. The fundamental difference of Aqualogic
Portal is that Aqualogic based on SOA architecure. It means that aqualogic portlets may hosted on remote servers pretty
much as Web Services and still access Portal functionality throuth http protocol. Because there is no need to host
these portlets on portal server they may run in different environment and they can be written in .Net and Java.
It's important to note that these portlets are not
SOAP web services, they are still portlets and may even
run in JSR-168 Containet if you want to.
One of the main benifits that I can see here from corporate point of view is that you don't stuck with Java. You
can also use .NET if you want to. Also there is much more easy to convert current applications into portlet
because you don't need convert them into JSR-168 compatible portlets. By the way JSR-168 is 4 years old and
doesn't cover too much that we need in development. You can not use AJAX (specification clear state that rest of
the portlets have to be rendered), security based on
Servlet spec (from my point of view portlets have to trust
portal, and in Servlet spec all depend on application server), there is no client-side inter portlet
communication in JSR168 (yes, there is server side based on application scope and I don't think it's really good).
So I don't really see why somebody want to develop JSR168 compatible portlet. If this portlet a little bit
more complex then "Hello World" then even being JSR168 will not garantie it will work the some way on different Portal
platform and some adjustment may be needed.
Aqualogic also provides all this nice features for cross portlet communication based on client side (Javascipt)
inter portlet communication as soon as server side (sharing data in session scope if your portlets belong the some
war). And because there is no restiction to use only JSR168, you got integrated AJAX functionality, inline refresh,
broadcast messaging with master and details portlet. Yes that will not work on different Portal platform, but
does that really important in corporate world? I don't think so (I can say this based on my 6 years experience
in portal/portlet corporate development over the world).
[ April 03, 2007: Message edited by: Dmitry Bryazgin ]