Portal Update August 2008

Enjoy this year's last summer edition :-) of the monthly portal summary by Cambridge Technology Partners:

• SUN: At JavaOne 2008, I attended the session about project SocialSite [PDF] where it was announced. Now it has been officially launched on August 8th: an open source project building Widgets and Web Services that make it easy for you to add social networking features to your existing web applications and therefore portals as well.
  One of the key technology used in SocialSite is Shindig, a reference implementation for the Google-initiated OpenSocial API (now up to v0.8). This API has strong backup from all the major social networks (LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Ning, SalesForce.com, Hi5, and more), Facebook is not on the list (so far).
  Side remark: SocialSite also belongs to the Glassfish Community.
  
• SUN: WebSynergy: As posted in July's portal summary, Liferay and SUN jointly work on the next generation portal technology. On August 1st, this roadmap has been posted which gives some hints about what we can expect.
• SUN: WebSynergy: On august 28th, Stable Build 2 has been released! The feature list is really impressive:
  - Fully JSR-286 compliant and full tooling support via Portal Pack for Netbeans.
  - WSRP 2.0 consumer feature is integrated in this release (more to come, see more details later)
  - Liferay Portal has been modified to use the Mirage API. This API enables WebSynergy access JCR-compliant repositories.
  - The Roller Blog app provides integration with Roller Weblogger version 4.0. Using this app, portal users can create and manage blogs on a Roller 4.0 server.
  - The Simple API for Workflow (SAW) feature is integrated now. You can use SAW to connect to a business process engine (which is provided through e.g. Java CAPS)
  
• SUN: The WSRP Team of WebSynergy has finalized phase 1 of their current integration project and integrated the WSRP 2.0 Consumer into Liferay. This feature allows applications hosted on remote sites (e.g. OpenPortal portlets) to be presented through the Liferay portal desktop. Next step is integrating the producer part. Stay tuned.
• SUN: Netbeans 6.1: Portal Pack 2.0.1 has been released. It features support for JSR-286 portlets, a visual portlet builder plugin to build JSF portlets and code auto completion for the portlet 1.0/2.0 taglib, just to name a few features.
  
• eXo:
  - Aug 11th: eXo has released Portal 2.2: Support of Cometd, extended REST support, support latest Groovy version 1.5.6
  - Aug 15th: eXo has released an "all in one" bundle which includes Portal 2.1
  - No updates regarding WebOS
  Announcements for future releases:
  - With the next portal release in september, GWT applications can be run in the eXo Portal.
  
• JBoss:
  - JBoss released JBoss Tools 3.0.0 alpha1 which features initial support for portlets (JSR-168 and JSR-286) including JSF and Seam. A nice guideline has been posted here.
  - They have announced that JBoss Portal 2.7 will be released in september. As indicated in our last month's portal post, Portal 2.7 integrates the new JBoss Portlet container implementing the Portlet 2.0 API (JSR 286).
• Oracle (BEA): As announced in the strategic webcast beginning of july, the only strategic portal product is Oracle WebCenter Suite. I remember the slides with three columns "strategic", "continue & converge" and "maintenance". BEA WebLogic Portal (WLP), Oracle Portal as well as AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) were in the middle column.
  Nonetheless, it was not clear to me that today's WebCenter Suite contains most collaborative components of ALUI already. This I somehow discovered in the official description now. So it seams that ALUI has converged much quicker than WLP (if that is going to be converged at all).
  As far as WLP and Oracle Portal are concerned, they are both not strategic but Oracle currently assures support and product evolution for at least the next 9 years (e.g. upcoming WLP release). Evolution can also be reached through three different integration possibilities with WebCenter Suite: Either through Oracle WebCenter Services, Oracle ECM Services or via remote portlets over WSRP (which means that new applications are developed and deployed to WebCenter and consumed in the legacy portal...).
• Oracle (BEA): no official details yet about upcoming release of WLP 10.3 yet (Codename Sunshine). Stay tuned.
  
• IBM: no updates for August
  
• Vendor agnostic:
  - InfoQ has posted Part 1 and Part 2 out of three articles about writing portlets using JSF, Ajax and Seam deployed to JBoss Portal. For a quick intro they are really worth looking at.
  - The OpenPortal community hosted by SUN contains many sub projects where JSF Portlet Bridge is one of those. End of July, they released version 1.2.3 which is a bugfix release for JSF 1.2. It enables JSF applications to run in a Portlet 2.0 container. The bridge fully supports JSR-301 which defines two bridges: JSF 1.2 with Portlet 1.0 container and JSf 1.2 with Portlet 2.0. The reference implementation for JSR-301 is the MyFaces Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portal runs with its own bridge implementation, which is also JSR-301 compliant and integrates well with Seam and AJAX.
  
  

Wow, quite a lot for one month!
Cheers,
Balz ... with inputs from CTP Java Fellow Thomas ;-) Messiiiiiiiii