Oracle Portal is Editor's Choice

Oracle Portal Wins Editor's Choice Award

Jon Mead points out an article currently running over at Network Computing that compares the portal offerings from companies such as Oracle, BEA, Plumtree, IBM and Microsoft, with a special emphasis on integrating applications into the portal with little or no coding. Oracle come out of it very well, gaining plaudits for features such as the OmniPortlet and the WebClipping portlets, the process used for inter-portlet communication, and the ease with which non-programmers can integrate applications into Portal using web-based design tools. According to the article:

"The winner of our Editor's Choice award, OracleAS Portal, really impressed us. With its entirely Web-based visual environment for development and a wide variety of preintegrated portlets, we were able to develop our portal without the frustration we encountered with some of the other products.

The OmniPortlet, a prebuilt portlet, is a definite winner for Oracle. It offers the easiest method of creating portlets to access a number of data sources, including XML, Web services and databases. Although some of the other products we tested offer similar functionality out of the box, only Oracle has one easy-to-configure portlet. We also were impressed with OracleAS' visual layout tool."

"OracleAS outshone every other product but Sybase's in its ability to create composite applications and handle interportlet communication without code. This is excellent: It means you can easily train business users to build their own applications by combining portlets. OracleAS uses an event system similar to that of Plumtree's. However, Plumtree's architecture requires that at least three lines of JSP code be written to generate and process such events, whereas the portals from Oracle, Sybase and Tibco require no code whatsoever.

Oracle's pricing is also a sweet spot. Its Enterprise Edition is $20,000 per CPU; only Sybase and Sun came close to offering such a feature-rich product without giving purchasers sticker shock."