Portal Update June 2008

A bit late, I know, but we decided to post a monthly summary on what is cooking in the Portal Technology space.
So here we go with the June edition:

• June 12th: Portlet 2.0 API Spec (JSR-286) became final!
• JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 released!
  This will be delivered together with upcoming JSR-286 compliant JBoss Portal Product.
• Oracle and BEA: Strategic Oracle Portal is WebCenter.
  WebLogic Portal (WLP) is going to be converged with WebCenter Framework where AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) is converged with WebCenter Communities & Spaces.

OpenSource Portals:

• eXo Portal 2.1 released: Full compliance with Portlet 2.0 API (JSR 286) and WSRP 2.0
• Liferay's Open Source Portal "Liferay Portal 5.0" has been released on June 16th.
  
• SUN officially joins Liferay's Open Source Community (see next item)
• SUN: WebSynergy becomes the killer Glassfish Portal Product Bundle. It is bundled with the open source portal Liferay 5.0 and with SUN's next generation application server Glassfish v3 and MySQL.
  

Summary of Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategy Webcast of July 1st 2008

While I read through several infos about yesterday's webcast, I took some notes and want to share the summary here. Give me feedback should there be missing infos or even wrong infos.

• Strategy: Oracle President Charles Phillips says that the acquisition of BEA is not "yet another one". Reason: BEA was leader in middleware and well positioned in China market. On top of that, BEA's products are very much complementary to Oracle's.
  

• And, among the three product pillars "database", "middleware" and "applications", middleware is the fastest growing at the moment, and probably in the next few years.

• Product Support: All BEA products will continue to be supported under the same time lines previously published by BEA prior to its acquisition.

• Product Categories: are divided into three categories from a strategic product point of view: "Strategic Product", "Continue & Converge" and "Maintenance"

• "Strategic" means: immediate integration into Oracle's Fusion Middleware Stack offering. If a BEA product has been selected as "strategic", it means that the BEA product is taken as such. The corresponding Oracle product (if there is any) is integrated into the BEA product (Integration Path: Oracle -> BEA).

• "Continue & Converge" means: BEA products in this category need some redesign with gradual integration into the Fusion MW Stack (so there the integration path is BEA -> Oracle); products are supported for at least 9 years

• "Maintenance" means: patches only, product phases out, support for at least 4 or 5 years

• WLS has become the strategic JEE container, but OC4J development is kept ongoing (reason unknown). Primary focus for next WLS version is OSGi integration.
  WLS is now called Oracle WebLogic Server and is bundled with JRockit and WebLogic Operations Control as Oracle WebLogic Suite.
  It is also interesting that WLS is moving from openJPA / Kodo to TopLink / EclipseLink which is the same persistence layer technologies as in SUN's Glassfish (v2 and v3).
  

• JRockit (BEA / Intel JVM) is strategic.

• SOA: BEA's ALSB and Oracle's ESB are converged into a new product called Oracle Service Bus (OSB), also strategic.

• SOA Governance: AL Enterprise Repository (ALER) is rebranded into Oracle SOA Governance Repository. The existing Oracle Service Registry is kept as the UDDI product.

• BPM: ALPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager are merged into a new product called "Oracle BPM", also strategic.

• Portals: Oracle's existing products "WebCenter Framework" and "WebCenter Suite" are continuing to be the strategic products in the portal space.

• AL-Pathways and AL-Ensemble as such are categorized as "Maintenance", but the RESTful APIs of those are converged into WebCenter Suite.

• WLP and ALUI (just the portal piece of ALI): continue development, but long-term integration into WebCenter portfolio (WLP into WebCenter Framework and ALUI into WebCenter Spaces&Suites).
  
  Link to Oracle WebCenter Suite:
  http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/webcenter/index.html

• Monitoring: BEA Guardian is integrated into Oracle Enterprise Manager

• Product Downloads: Technical Previews of BEA products are no longer public. This means that for instance WLS 10.3 TP2 must be requested through partner sites (I will check what that really means).

• BEA Communities such as Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch are migrated to OTN: http://otn.oracle.com/

• IDEs: Oracle's JDeveloper is going to be the primary IDE. Besides that, Oracle will publish an "Oracle Eclipse Plugin Pack", kind of continuing the BEA Workshop roadmap.

• Conferences: Oracle Open World 2008 Sep 21-25 in San Francisco (BEA World is now integrated into this), Oracle Develop Program (dev2dev conference is now integrated into this)
• Original Webcast PDF