Portal Update September 2008

Despite autumn degrees start dropping, portal updates don't get freezed:

• SUN presents Mango*: Traditionally when we talk about the FOSS stack (free open source software), the first thing that still comes to mind is the LAMP/SAMP stack (Linux/Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PHP/perl/pyhton).
  While LAMP/SAMP has been very successful for lots of Internet based businesses (e.g. Facebook), it may not be enough for enterprises looking for advanced middleware features found in commercial products (like JavaEE5 features in general, Portals, SSO, etc.).
  Along with the evolution of Java based open source products, SUN positions certain bundles to build the official successor of FOSS:
  MANGO* (MySQL And Netbeans, Glassfish and an Open*-Glassfish product) can be seen as the next generation FOSS stack or FOSS 2.0 which brings reliable, scalable and open software to the enterprise. So with the OpenPortal project, there is a strong OSS portal stack ready as a Mango... nice!
  
• SUN: WebSynergy Community Build 5 has been released at the end of this month! Updates are: WSRP 2.0 improvements, jBPM integration into SAW and first functionalities of SWA (Secure Web Access, originally packaged with OpenPortal).
  
• SUN: Netbeans 6.5: Portal Pack 3.0 M1 has been released. It supports WebSynergy Stable Build 2, and has provides tooling for the following:
  - Non-Java portlets: Groovy, Ruby and PHP
  - SAW-Plugin included (Simple API for Workflow)
  - The plugin for the JCR based Mirage product is also included
  
  
• eXo:
  - People News: Sep 8th: former JBoss portal project lead Julien Viet starts as new eXo Portal Product Manager with focus on portlet container and JCR.
  - They announced a new release for september including GWT application support in the eXo Portal. I have not seen such a release this month, so if I missed it, let me know. Otherwise I'll post it next month.
  
  
• JBoss:
  - JBoss released JBoss Portal 2.7.0 CR1
  - JSR-286 Portlet Coordination: a very good post about how JBoss Portal has implemented this new Portlet 2.0 feature.
  
  
• Oracle (BEA)
  - WebLogic Portal 10g3: On Sep 16th, Oracle has released Oracle WebLogic Portal 10g3 for download. It is pretty much like WLP 10.2 with the major difference that it runs on WebLogic Server 10.3. The codename for this release is Sunrise.
  - WebCenter Interaction (formerly known as BEA ALUI): No news during this month.
  - Oracle seeds the cloud: At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle announced that it will certify/support deployments of Oracle Database (all editions), Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware (and therefore WLP and WebCenter Suite) to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In fact you may transfer your existing licenses to AWS if you like. Oracle is also providing free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in that environment, so you can get up and running on a full Oracle-on-EC2 environment in minutes.
  - Oracle Beehive: At OpenWorld 2008, Oracle announced Oracle Beehive (for the developers: this is NOT Apache Beehive): "Oracle Beehive is the solution to cure the present communication fragmentation", said Oracle President Charles Phillips and continued: "The goal is to take a company's setup, in which various communication and collaboration software applications from a number of vendors are running on an army of servers, and integrate the offerings into one Beehive system."
  
  Architecturally, it is an open, secure, scalable and standards based Collaboration Platform providing all collaboration features through web services (using WSDL, SOAP, WS-Security based on SAML). The core of the platform is based on an event-driven architectural style which allows easy logic implementations for certain events (like "customer got an email"). Content-wise the platform features a JSR-170 compliant interface for document accesses as well as interfaces for protocols like IMAP and SMTP (mail), WebDAV (documents), CalDAV (calendar events), XMPP (instant messaging).
  
  Beehive has been quoted already as "Oracle's answer to Microsoft's Sharepoint, but with real enterprise readiness".
  However the uphill battle in the collaboration market will look like, I wonder how Oracle will position it with the feature-overlapping WebCenter Suite (which includes collaboration components of BEA ALUI already). It probably addresses a different business need (e.g. build collaboration platform from scratch or from existing).
  
  
• IBM: no updates for September:
  - still WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 with a couple of extension modules, called portal accelerators
  - WebSphere Portals can be tried out without installation at IBM's Greenhouse
  
  
• Vendor agnostic:
  - CTP: Our collegues from the Advisory Solutions have posted a nice overview on enterprise portals in the future.
  - As indicated in last month's post, InfoQ has now posted all three articles about writing portlets using JSF, Ajax and Seam deployed to JBoss Portal: Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3.