by Michael “Spoon” Witherspoon, Lead Portlet Factory Architect

IT has been my thing for a long time.  As a result I don’t get too excited about new technology or advancements in existing technology all that often.  Today is different.  I just attended Jonathan Booth’s presentation on building mobile apps with WebSphere Experience Factory (Portlet Factory 7.0.1) and now I’m excited about an advancement in existing technology.  In my opinion, these new capabilities are the best thing that has happened to Portlet Factory in a while. (I’m not implying anything bad has happened but this new stuff is huge!) Today I intend to download the beta and build some sample apps using the models and portlets we already have in our Top Gun course (IBM WPC52).  It looks pretty easy to do.

When building applications for multiple devices when you are not using Portlet Factory, there is a ton of extra work to do to create the myriad versions of the app in order to get it to work in web browsers and on mobile devices.  Even within the mobile device world there are iPhones, Android phones, Blackberries and all of the tablet PCs such iPads and the like.  When using Portlet Factory, the mobile application builders coupled with Portlet Factory profiling make light work of creating these variations of the core application.  If any development tool could be custom designed to be a perfect fit for developing multi-channel applications, WebSphere Experience Factory  is it.

It looks to me like the Portlet Factory team has hit a home run with these new features.  I’m really looking forward to doing some late night dev work to try this stuff out.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll have my first multi-channel application built.  Since the world seems to be headed toward mobile computing as the de facto standard, the timing of this next release of the Factory is excellent.