Portal Update March / April 2009

Winter has turned into Spring, at least here in Switzerland... and in parallel to the brighter days, let's bring some light into the Java Portal area as well: What products are interesting these days and which should be followed for sure in 2009?

From the commercial side, major players are:

• Oracle WebLogic Portal 10.3:
  formerly known as BEA WebLogic Portal
• Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g TP4:
  WebCenter Suite also includes the formerly known product AquaLogic Interaction by BEA, now called WCI, WebCenter Interaction. Longterm, WLP will probably fully converge with WebCenter Suite where nowadays integration happens via the WebCenter Services.
  
• IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1

Open Source portals that have the most promising potential at the moment are:

• Liferay Portal 5.2:
  back in August 2008, SUN and Liferay announced their partnership to work jointly on the next portal generation and presented their roadmap, Liferay keeping their Liferay Portal and SUN continuing their WebSynergy project).
  
  
• SUN's brand new Web Space Server:
  Since February 2009, SUN has released Web Space Server version 10 which is including all the efforts from the internal Project WebSynergy. WebSpace Server is not only a portal product, it is a full fletched portal platform and has been integrated into the Glassfish Portfolio.
  For more info, read their first documentations.
  


• JBoss Portal 2.7.2:
  - On March 12th, JBoss has released the latest version of its portal product and is available for download.
  - On Apr 3rd, JBoss released the JSR-301 compliant Portlet Bridge CR1. Currently the bridge supports any combination of JSF, Seam, and RichFaces to run inside a portlet.
  
  
• eXo Portal 2.5.1
  
  
• Jetspeed 2: no updates since version 2.1.3 from December 2007.
  

From a portal technology point of view, it is interesting to see the product's maturity with regards to the following standards:

• JSR-168 - Portlet Specification (final since Oct 2003)
  
• JSR-286 - Portlet Specification 2.0 (final since June 2008)
  
• WSRP 1.0 - The first specification of Web Services for Remote Portlets (final since August 2003)
  
• WSRP 2.0 (final since April 2008)
  
• JSR-301: Portlet 1.0 (JSR-168) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.x:
  Current Status: proposed final draft in Jan 2009
  Currently available implementations of JSR-301:
  - MyFaces Portlet Bridge
  - OpenPortal Portlet Bridge (used in Liferay Portal)
  - JBoss Portlet Bridge (used by JBoss Portal)
  
• JSR-329: Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.2:
  too early for products to support this JSR as it has been created in January 2009 and is in the status "Early Draft Review" as of March 2009.
  Note that this specification is led by Oracle exclusively at the moment.
• JSR-314: JSF 2.0:
  The support of JSF 2.0 in a portlet container is not yet officially addressed. There is no JSR around like "Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.0".
  

Besides the Portal related activities, let's have a look on Java related quick news:

• SUN has announced that Glassfish v3 Milestone 2 will be ready by Java One 2009 in June.
  For the complete schedule, click on this link.
• Liferay 5.2 is now fully supporting WSRP 2.0 with the release of the WSRP 2.0 FCS binary.
• Oracle & SUN: Oracle buys SUN as of the announcement on April 20th 2009.
  It will be very interesting what will happen to SUN's products like
  - The whole Glassfish Portfolio
  - MySQL
  - Netbeans
  - OpenSolaris and
  - JavaFX
• Java EE 6: The JSR-316 has passed the Public Review state. See its results.