Netvibes - technology for portals

I have been using Netvibes when I first heard about it more than an year back , well untill recently when I can't use it in office anymore as it has been blocked by office firewall . With popularity of AJAX and Web 2.0, there has been a revolution in widget technology on internet and traditional HTML based interfaces found on web have undergone radical changes with web GUIs becoming richer and modular with passing time. I have known many developers who considered HTML and Front end programming like CSS, JS as demeaning as compared to more attractive and sexy middleware programming and this is the reason that most of web based applications written for enterprises typically have poorer UIs which do not meet any standards whatsoever. With AJAX and widgetry being used now, it has become important for one to have specialised skills in XHTML, CSS and Javascript.

While doing an internal project for my orgnanisation few months back, we had a requirement for creating a prototype for a employee intranet portal and we had little time of a week to demonstrate that how such a portal could be built with simpler technologies. We borrowed from Netvibes idea of creating a user driven portal with RSS as the main channel for content onto the portal. Having worked on some of portal server's personalisation mechanisms during course of my previous projects, I was surprised how easy it was in reality to create a portal and such a mechanism with simple JSP, AJAX and some open source web servers. As a prototype we could easily build a RSS driven portal like Netvibes where various content sources like wikis or knowledge sites acted as rss producers for portal to be consumed.

A real test of a technology is when end users like it and start using it. Netvibes has now acquired around 15 million registered users and it was identified as a disruptor and innovator by CNN Money . Internet is so powerful because it adopts useful technologies faster unlike enterprises behind firewalls who mull over things forever and almost stifle any adoption of useful and newer technologies which would have benefitted them.