What I did last week
I didn't work on my current project with OnPoint Digital, Inc., but rather attended an iPlanet Portal Bootcamp at Sun. It was a week long 8 a.m. - 6 p.m. class, where I learned a ton about Portal, in hopes of teaching a Portal class in the future. Sun calls these classes T3's for Train-The-Trainer, so I am now certified to teach iPlanet Portal 3.0. I'm more interested in Sun ONE Portal 6.0 - so hopefully this will help me get lined up to teach that.
I attended the class with Martin Gee, and Michael Zucker; two good friends from ICSynergy. Martin recently published a book on iPlanet Application Server, and it looks really good. I browsed through my signed copy and it's got a lot of great information on developing J2EE apps. It's too bad iPlanet has gotten bad press from developers, because it really it really is a good product if you know all it's qwirks. I've used it since it was Netscape Application Server 2.1, so I got to learn all the qwirks the hard way. Hopefully Sun ONE Application Server will be a lot better.