There is some interesting speculation about the future of JSR-168 going on at the Portlets Yahoo! Group. IMO (which is a redundant thing to say because this whole blog is My Opinion), I don't think the spec is going away by any means. But at the same time, it seems that the entire industry has come to recognize it as the "lowest common denominator" of portlet functionality. In terms of features, it fails to specify portlet-to-portlet communication APIs among several other things. But worst of all, it's designed with the presumption that the portlets will always run inside the portal container. Humph.