Discussion on:

Avoid Oracle Portal at all costs

If you've used one of the other JSR-168 containers out there, what did you think? I'd love to hear any experiences, good or bad, with the alternative products out there on the market.

BEA has a pretty easy import/export utility for migration between dev/test/prod:
http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs92/prodOps/xipTool.html

Have you tried Liferay Portal? It's probably the most mature
open source portal product on the market. (I must disclaim
that I work for Liferay.)

We've been using Oracle Portal since version 3.0.7. And I agree - since it's conception, transporting data has been it's weak-point. However, giving the complexity of the transport mechanism, before I yell "Oracle go home" I would like to know how other portals deals with the issue? Recall, moving content is more than simply moving a portal. There's metadata, related setups and even worse - in production users may have added their own content that you need to merge with.

So how does other products deal with it?

... but it seems like we've had this discussion two dozen times already.

Seriously, I am convinced at this point that you if wish to have reduced stress levels, you need to work on some projects where Oracle is, at most, simply the data backend. Their backend is great, but the rest of it is, at best, hacked up versions on existing FOSS software (I love their app server, it's just a really out of date copy of Jakarta/Tomcat plus some minor changes of dubious value and quality), at worst it is complete junk like you describe above.

J.Ja

I hear you, but the allure of being able to turn to one vendor for support is very seductive. Having the entire system running on Oracle apps means no matter what part is causing problems, we only have to turn to one company for assistance. There's no finger pointing between vendors saying the other guy's software caused the problem.

Just about to role out across 25 Servers after simulating 8000 users. Its taken an age to get to where we are, but happy that we can support it and it appears to be stable.

I have been consulting on oracle portal for the past couple of years. I have been doing content transports and I haven't had any major problems so far. Import/ export has improved a lot in latest version. You need to follow the steps throughly and keep the meta data repository clean. Oracle is not abandoning portal at all. WebCenter is a totally different product. http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdf/oracle_portal_sod_r11.pdf
I believe that Oracle portal is one of the best portal products available in the market right now.

In my experience as a user of it for self service at my grad school I have to agree that it is the buggiest piece of crap, um I mean software that I have encountered in the past 10 years(atleast). I just hope that my school decides to switch over to something a lot more stable.

This product is indeed a joke and so are the supporting products. I'm actively moving away from JDeveloper to Eclipse and keep dropping hints that we need to evaluate other Portal vendors (JBoss?). Additionally I'd like to note (for anyone running v10.1.2) that although you can deploy JSR-168 portlets to the container, you can not register them "with-in" the portal. This functionality is not available until v10.1.4.

Rex...we've already made the Oracle AS purchase, and so will be using Oracle Portal (we're running JDEdwards which explains the Oracle purchases if you're wondering)....we're moving from a cobbled together environment of Eclipse/Jboss/Liferay development...and I'm starting to try to put all the pieces of application/portlet development lifecyle together in my head...

It is so incredibly confusing trying to understand what works with what in all of this...you've got ADF, Struts Portlets, WebCenter...10G, 11G and documentation of varying versions all over the place...would anyone like to share any insights?