Are portlets "Dead" Technology?

I was tempted a couple of weeks ago to post here and say goodbye to working with portlets. Some of the portlets I'd been working on were beginning to get attention from management and we were asked to develop test plans for portlets that would demonstrate compliance with the JSR168/286 and WSRP 1.0/2.0 specifications.

Hoping to build off what others had done in this arena I began researching what was available on the Internet. One of the first articles I came across, http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2009/01/20/jsr-286-portlet-irrelevance.html, expressed many of the frustrations I'd encountered this past year. I did some forum postings myself and got answers like this:
https://wsrp.dev.java.net/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=494

The test script tool on SourceForge was once maintained by IBM (NetUnity Software) but a representative I contacted from NetUnity said "There has not been much activity for quite some time". Others told me similar things about the failure of the JSR168/286 and WSRP technologies to gain industry acceptance. That explains a lot of the difficulty this past year in finding help from other developers.

But, life goes on, and management doesn't necessarily want to hear that what you've spent all this time and money on is something that you think should be thrown out the window. Plus we had a major success with the group of portlets I had developed called "SOAPServiceClients". We deployed them on a virtual server loaded with GlassFish v2 and Portlet Container with the WSRP Open Portal plug-in. I exposed them as WSRP Producer portlets and a SharePoint portal was able to consume them.

For various political reasons that I won't go into here, the client that our team supports had been very anxious to see if this is something that could be accomplished. In theory, a Java shop can develop portlets that expose Web Services written in Java and then a Microsoft shop can display those Web Services in a presentation layer that is a WSRP Consumer web part in SharePoint. Theory and practice are often two different things and it's hard to find examples where this has actually been done. The client was very happy with the results, but I'm not sure what the real benefit is in the long run. It was a lot of work to just have a simple window on a web page where you can enter coordinates and calculate distance and bearing.