Last summer’s WebSphere Portal 6 did the heavy lifting with rich Internet clients, adding support of the enterprise mashups, plus support of Ajax-style programming where you could drag and drop rich JavaScript widgets, build Ajax-based context menus, and providing full Ajax and REST (a simplified form of data access that’s an alternative to SOAP for data queries) in IBM’s own WebSphere Portlet Factory development tool.
So, this being a dot release, the additions are somewhat more anticlimactic. They include a dashboard accelerator, where you can assemble dynamic dashboards through 60 prepackaged key performance indicators (KPIs). And the new release adds support for using REST-based web services from other development tools, support of partial screen refreshes, and type-ahead and semantic packs that auto-complete input being keyed into a portal.
