(April 23, 2002) - Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced its co-leadership of a new Java™ Specification Request (JSR #168) - intended to be the industry's first portal API standard - to expedite a common development approach for portal integration to help developers and enterprises deliver aggregated content and Web services more easily. In support of the JSR, an additional 18 companies, including BroadVision, Plumtree, and Vignette, will collaborate with Sun on the specification intended to enable interoperability independent of the portal vendor solution.

The new Java portlet API is intended to become the definitive Java specification defining a common model and Java interfaces for interoperable portal components, named ``portlets.'' which connect portal users to a variety of applications. The portlet API is intended to enable application, content, and service providers to implement portlets to a common, standard Java portlet API and package them in a standard manner so that they can be deployed on all compliant portal servers.

Developers will benefit from reduced development time and cost since the specification will be based on Java APIs. Likewise, enterprises will benefit from greater efficiency and ROI since a goal of the specification is to allow personalized, aggregated content to be delivered from portal platforms to end users from a multitude of application and content sources previously difficult to integrate.

``The need for industry standards is vital in the large and rapidly growing portal market,'' said Gene Phifer, vice president and research director for Gartner, Inc. ``As the delivery mechanism for Web services, portals will be come ubiquitous and must have a comprehensive standard defining interoperability for information exchange. A Java specification defining that integration process will substantially benefit customers, partners and developers.''

Currently, a variety of different APIs for portal components from different portal vendors exist, which creates difficulties for application providers, portal customers, and portal server vendors. Once established, the intent of the specification is to allow developers to reuse existing integration methods for faster addition of data, applications, and Web services from multiple back-end sources and enable enterprises to more easily use portal platforms for the secure, single point of entry in delivery of personalized content between multiple internal and external portal deployments. More information can be found at www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/168.jsp.