If you fear from EJB technology  (same as me) you
better fear from portal  technology. Creating a hello
world application  toke half month for me. There are
lots of discussions over web  which will make you
review your solution architecture  again. Like EJB
Application Servers, most of Portal Servers do not
work correctly.

We are using Jetspeed2 from Apache
(http://portals.apache.org). If you found a good, easy
to use and flexible portal server; if you are not a
witch, you are really so lucky.