Bowstreet upgrades portal tools

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.

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Martin LaMonica

Dec. 18, 2002 8:23 a.m. PT

Bowstreet this week upgraded its Portlet Factory software to make it easier for IBM WebSphere Portal customers to build portal applications. Portlet Factory 5.5 includes a series of tools including a "wizard" that walks a software programmer through the steps of creating a portlet, or an application that presents information from several applications in a single window. The goal of the Portlet Factory is to make portal application creation accessible to a wider set of programmers, not exclusively the highly skilled developers that are proficient with J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application server standard, said Joe Lichtenberg, vice president of marketing at Bowstreet.

Although Bowstreet initially sold a Web services development tool, the company has shifted its focus to creating tools for portal development, particularly highly customized applications, Lichtenberg said.