WebSphere Portal and JSR 168

Initially we started migrating a project thinking that the JSR 168 standard is a totally portable way of writing portlets. After a few months of development we found that our code is sucked in by WebSphere portal. As much as we tried to, we coudn’t keep our code portable. All the navigation code including tag handlers became deeply embedded within the portal themes. Apart from that our authorization code now depends on the portal implementation.

We couldn’t figure out when WebSphere portal would support JSR 115. Our JSR 168 portlets are still portable but what use are they without the rest of the infrastructure provided by WebSphere Portal.