Developing social applications on Portal specially using  IBM WEF ( or other platforms like PTK ) requires developers to have two primary skills, those being, web development ( Portal ) and social (Application Programming Interface, REST, XML, JSON, Networking, parsing of responses etc. ). A pre-requisite of developing such a software would be to educate the developer in both these domains extensively. In addition to this, developer would also need to invest time in familiarizing and learning API's of the specific target social software like IBM Connections, Domino, Sametime, Smartcloud etc. Clearly developing skills in all the disparate technologies and developing a glitch free code is a challenge for a new developer. Even for experienced developers it means they end up investing more time on code related to broader infrastructure of software ( like service layer, network layer, parsers etc. ) than on the core business application.