My Portal Project

Over the years I have worked with a few portal products like Websphere, Aptrix, Oracle, Tibco, and about a dozen PHP open source solutions. My current employment has me working for an organization with some bad experiences with Java (write once, twice, and again…) and have decided that for web development projects we will use .NET as the primary, and Domino as a secondary platform.

Even if we were considering J2EE, I have had far too many bad experiences with that steaming pile of horse dung called Websphere, and Oracle and Tibco are WAY too expensive for this company’s taste (websphere falls into this category too). If only Domino could really perform at the level we need it, I could probably swing bringing it into parity with .NET, but IBM has placed its money on Websphere, and Domino has been left to swing in the wind.

So where does that leave us? Sharepoint, DotNetNuke, and Rainbow Portal.

Having not read a single good user review of Sharepoint we were all very skeptical. The price is not too bad at $71USD per named user and $4kUSD per server, but we had all expected to find alot more in teh realm of reviews than we did find. We are going to continue looking into setting up a test box and testing it, but we are also going to look into some open source solutions.

I was under the impression that the only open source solution for .NET was DotNetNuke, so we gave it a whirl. First we ran the DNN4.0 install and it seemed to be ok except we could not get it to play nice with other apps running in the .Net 1.1 framework (DNN4 runs on the R2 framework). We got around that by setting up the applications in different application pools, but it took alot out of us. After that, we tried to get the integrated authentication to work with Active Directory, which we could not. Far too many hours were spent trying to do what should have been a core competency of an application running in the .NET world. The admin UI was pretty solid and performance seemed “ok”.

Next we tried Rainbow Portal, and after having to suffer through too many jokes about my manhood (I am now “rainbow-boy”), I got it installed and running in about 30 minutes. My first attempt to get it connected to active directory failed miserably with the application entering into an infinite loop with the authentication page. After a few google’s I realized that I was running a release candidate (Rainbow 2006), and downloaded the stable version. After 25 minutes it was up and running, and 10 minutes after that we had the integrated authentication with AD working.

The down side of Rainbow is that the administrative UI is a bit fugly, but it gets the job done and seems to be pretty responsive. Whereas DotNetNuke is written in VB.NET, Rainbow is done with C# which I find to be very refreshing since I have alot more experience with Java which C# resembles in syntax.

I’ll be modifying some of the Rainbow modules to work with the web services that I have done in Domino, and if we can use the credentials of the AD user to make the call, I will only have to configure Domino to run as a plugin to IIS and we will have a completely integrated single sign-on environment between .NET apps and Domino. For this company, and many others, this type of environment is the Holy Grail. With users logged into the corporate AD domain, and using IE, they will never have to see a password prompt unless we want them to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 10:08 am and is filed under Notes/Domino, Microsoft, Portals, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.