The November 3rd 2004 Forrester report, Trends 2005: Enterprise Portals ($$) by Laura Ramos, makes some interesting predictions. One is the demise of the portal market, except for niche players in vertical markets and the other is the drive to composable applications and rich functionality.
Her point is that portal technology will drop into the core development infrastructure. This is already happening with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts Framework, which will form the foundation of SharePoint Services technology.
The report also supports the idea of “Composable Applications” which lies at the heart of the Dashboard/Web Parts/Portlet model. Interestingly, though, is the mention of “[b]usness apps that require persistent state, rich UIs, or real-time delivery of server-side data in volume.” The report speaks of technologies such as IBM's Workspace Client and Nexaweb. These tools are supposed to evolve to “consume standards-compliant portlets, cross device footprints, and let user access portals even when left offline.”
Hmm, sounds a lot like smart clients!
One interesting thought here, though is if portals are trending to smart clients, what is the Web Part analog on Windows Forms/Avalon? Time to start desiging some technology, I would say.
In fact, that would put Microsoft way ahead of the curve when .NET 2.0 comes out.
The MSDN Smart Client Developer Center has been relaunched. They even have a new graphic!
I have to say, though that the old Venn diagram communicates a bit better.
The graphic is from their Smart Client Definition page. Without further ado, I give you Smart Client:
Smart client (n) Definition: Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide an adaptive, responsive and rich interactive experience by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.
A smart client:
- has local resources and user experience
- is connected
- is offline capable
- has intelligent deployment and update
In WS-Addressing, End Point References include the concept of Reference Properties and Reference Parameters. If I read Omri Gazitt's explanation of the difference between the two it seems to make sense. However, I then read Clemens Vasters post and get thoroughly confused. Can anyone decipher?
Dave Orchard has more explanations.