We had a conference call today with some IBM Websphere specialists on an issue we’re having with intra-portlet communication. They have been gently hinting that their customers should move to JSR-168 because they’re taking out the IBM portlet API. Still with enterprise software vendors you figure this will be a very slow process. Verbally today they made it quite clear that they plan on moving to JSR-168 aggressively, and that in Websphere Portal 6.0 they’re actually deprecating IBM portlets in favor of JSR-168. The mentioned the word deprecated at least four or five times in a short discussion around the topic.
Just to prove that they’re an enterprise vendor at heart they did explain that they’re also pushing SDO (Service Data Objects), which is no longer a JSR, (or at least an active JSR) but more of a push by an “industry consortium”. How that plays out is still an open question.