As you know, in May of this year, Sun and Liferay announced a partnership to jointly develop next generation enterprise portal technology.  The Sun portal team has since begun the rollout of Project WebSynergy, codename for the initiative to release a product based on this common technology.

The Project WebSynergy team is now proud to make its Stable Build 2 available for download!  This release represents a significant milestone for the project, incorporating a number of new features, improvements, and a general enhancements over the last stable build (which was made available in May @ JavaOne).

Some of the things to look for in SB2:

• Release Stability and Cadence

The primary goal of this release was to establish regular builds (which you will start seeing regularly, not once every 2 months), get testing frameworks in place and automated (as soon as the public site, see below, is setup, automated test results will be posted as well), and establish basic hooks/frameworks in the Liferay community for future builds/releases to take advantage of.  As mentioned in my previous post, this is a Stable Build (as opposed to a Community Build or Commercial Release).

• Portlet Container 2.0

The OpenPortal Portlet Container is a fully compliant implementation of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) specification. It also implements many optional features such as expiration and validation caching, support for aliases in eventing and public render parameters, and support for wildcards in eventing. WebSynergy development tools have complete support for JSR 286 and Portlet Container 2.0.

• WSRP 2.0 Consumer Support & Admin Application
  

WSRP 2.0 Consumer support is now available.  In addition, a WSRP consumer administration application is available in WebSynergy that enables managing multiple WSRP Consumers. For more information, read the blog post.

• Mirage/Journal

Liferay Portal has been modified to use the Mirage API. This API enables WebSynergy to use JCR-compliant repository.

• Roller Blog Application

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.

• Simple API for Workflow

The Simple API for Workflow (SAW) feature is integrated into the Project WebSynergy SB 2 stable build. A sample Expense Report portlet provided with this feature showcases a typical enterprise Expense Report Application that involves human workflow. You can use SAW to connect to a business process engine such as the Java Composite Application Platform Suite provides the workflow functionality to the Expense Report portlet.

• Presence

For more information on this feature, see this article on the Liferay wiki. In upcoming Project WebSynergy builds, new applications using this infrastructure will provide a more presence-aware Portal to end users.

• Semantic

Core semantic processing libraries and utilities have been integrated into the portal. In the upcoming Project WebSynergy builds, the communities in the Liferay Portal Communities use this feature to provide a semantically rich experience to end users.

This build represents another in a series of binary releases of this project leading up to Sun's commercial release.  The product based on this project is also being renamed (Project WebSynergy is the internal codename), and we really don't want to have name confusion between the free-to-use, open source version and commercially supported version, so the external site presence (as described in my previous post) does not yet exist.  This should be resolved in the 14 days.

The OpenPortal WSRP Project consumer is now integrated into Liferay Portal. The next stable release of Liferay Portal is expected to have both the OpenPortal WSRP producer and consumer integrated in it.

Checkout the following posts for detailed information on this integration.

1. OpenPortal WSRP 2.0 Consumer in Liferay
2. Testing WSRP 2.0 interoperability in Liferay
   

Stay tuned on the OpenPortal WSRP Project mailing list for more information w.r.t to this integration.  

Community

1. portal.dev.java.net - Core portal software, from which Sun's commercial Portal Server 7.x vintage is derived.  In addition, patches to 7.x will be generated for 7.x from this project's source.  No changes planned.
2. <name>.dev.java.net - Parent project of Project WebSynergy, from which Sun will derive a commercial offering.  Source and regular builds will appear here once the site is operational.  The name of this site is TBD.
   
3. [mirage,saw,wsrp,ruon,swa,portlet-container,jsfportletbridge].dev.java.net -  Projects delivering major functionality, consumed by both Sun Portal Server 7.x and WebSynergy.  No changes planned.
4. portalpack.netbeans.org - NetBeans & Eclipse plugins for developing portlets.  No changes planned.

Roadmap

1. Community Build: Lightly tested, new features likely to be incomplete or have issues. Entirely supported by Community. New community builds generally available approximately 2-3 times a month.
2. Stable Build: Higher amount of testing. Complete documentation. Available roughly every 6-8 weeks.
3. Commercial Release - Highest amount of testing, complete documentation, commercial support available. Suitable for long term enterprise deployments. Frequency varies.
   

The demo that was made available at JavaOne represented the first Stable Build (SB1). SB2's plan is to be available this  onth, with an expected date for the first Commercial Release in the first quarter of 2009. Before SB2, there may be a community build (I had implied it would be this week, but a few of the features going into Liferay are still under code review, and not ready yet).

As indicated in the original announcement, we are not maintaining a fork. Instead, various components will be developed in WebSynergy, some of which will be integrated upstream (e.g. in Liferay) as needed, and a commercial release (and associated sustaining tail) will be initiated for each Commercial Release.  This is depicted in the below illustration (click on the image to get a larger version!).

What you should get out of this image:

1. The names of the components and releases and dates are all subject to change :-)
   
2. There is no fork.  Each release is based off of a specific point in time of all components, including Liferay.  For the next release(s), new snapshots are taken, and the old ones ignored.
3. Bugfixes bi-directionally flow between WebSynergy and Liferay before and after each Commercial Release. 
   

Stay tuned for part 2 and for the new WebSynergy site and builds to go live soon!

The JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) specification has been released. Congratulations to Stefan Hepper, the spec lead of JSR 286 and the rest of the expert group. It has been a pleasure working with all on this JSR.

The main features of this JSR include

• Eventing
• Public Render Parameters
• Resource Serving
• Portlet Filters
• Validation based caching
• Request Dispatcher Include & Forward from all lifecycle
• Container Runtime Options
• Enhanced Tag Library
  

OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0, which is a fully compliant implementation of the Portlet 2.0 (JSR286) specification, has been released. Check my blog for more details.

WSRP 2.0 offers Leasing of Portlets as part  of the specification. Leasing is the process by which a Consumer registers with a Producer for a specified time period, after which the Consumer Registration is rendered invalid. Lifetime is an optional parameter in the Registration offered by V2 producers. The OpenPortal WSRP project (Sun's open source implementation of WSRP ) has implemented this feature using the Open Source Portlet Container 2.0 . Check this wiki page for more information on portlet leasing.

Here's a primer on using the Leasing feature.. 

I would like to welcome Sytze van Koningsveld who has become an active contributor to the Eclipse Portalpack project. I was tied up with a lot of projects that I am involved in, and was not getting enough time to work on the Eclipse Portalpack. Sytze has shown keen interest in working with the Eclipse Portal Pack and we will be working together to take things forward. So please welcome him aboard the project.

 A small bit of information about Sytze in his own words :

"Sytze van Koningsveld was born in the Netherlands and has an MSc. degree in physics, works for over 10 years as a software developer mainly using Java. His programming experience ranges from Linux, COM and Corba to MDA, Jini, Eclipse plugins to portal web development with Spring and Hibernate. His current employer is Royal Dutch KLM in the Netherlands. You can reach him at sytzevk [AT] netscape [DOT] net."

Portal Server 7.2 is now available [download]. Based on the OpenPortal project, this release has several new features such as Delegated Administration, Google Gadget support, and JSR 286 / Portlet 2.0 support.

Looking ahead, Project WebSynergy [earlier post, info, download] is combining the efforts of Sun Portal and Liferay, and producing a lightweight, modular framework for developing and deploying next-gen webapps targeting the web 2.0 crowd. Looking forward to seeing this partnership in action!

We had recently started work on semantic enabling Project WebSynergy's community feature.

Read my blog on that.

For doing this we had to extend the existing table structure by adding new columns
and  also creating new tables.

In this blog I will show how easy it is do this using
Project WebSynergy's ServiceBuilder framework 

The use case for this example will be to add an ontologyId column
to the existing BlogsEntry table.
We would also create a new BlogsEntryOntologyMapping Table. 

Open the
<synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\patch\portal-impl\src\com\liferay
\portlet\blogs\service.xml
in your favorite IDE (we would recommend NetBeans)

Each <entity> tag corresponds to a table in the DB.

To add "OntologyId" column to the BlogsEntry table
add the following in <entity name="BlogsEntry"> </entity> tag

<column name="ontologyId" type="String" />

We can also add a finder method corresponding to the column that we have just added.
Using this the callers can get the blog entries corresponding to an ontologyId.

        <finder name="OntologyId" return-type="Collection">
            <finder-column name="ontologyId" />
        </finder>
This would generate a findByOntologyId() in the BlogsEntryPersistence
and BlogsEntryPersistenceImpl.

To add a new BlogsEntryOntlogyMapping table add the following 

 <entity name="BlogsEntryOntlogyMapping" local-service="true" remote-service="true">
        <column name="entryId" type="long" primary="true" />
        <column name="ontologyId" type="long" />
    </entity>

Next we need to add getBlogEntriesByOntologyId() to the BlogsEntryLocalServiceImpl class.

public List getBlogEntriesByOntologyId(String ontologyId) throws SystemException{ 

             List blogtnriesList = blogsEntryPersistence.findByOntologyId(ontologyId);

return blogtnriesList;

} 

You will get a compilation error on the blogsEntryPersistence.findByOntologyId(ontologyId) line.
This is because the method is still not added to the BlogsEntryPersistence interface.

But dont mind that as of now :)

After making these changes,
cd to <synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\portal\portal-impl
in the command prompt and run the following ant script.

ant build-service-portlet-blogs 

This generates all the service, util, persistence and  factory classes that are relevant to Blogs.

Open the <synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\portal\portal-service\src\com\liferay\portlet\blogs \service\persistence\BlogsEntryPersistence, you will find that the findByOntologyId() is newly generated.

Open the <synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\portal\portal-service\src\com\liferay\portlet\blogs\ service\BlogsEntryLocalService and BlogsEntryLocalServiceUtil, you will find that the getBlogEntriesByOntologyId() is newly generated.

Now you can call the BlogsEntryLocalServiceUtil .getBlogEntriesByOntologyId() from any portlet class or jsp,
you will get the blog entries that the specific ontologyId applied to that.

Next the changes have to be made in the db scripts.

For this run ant build-db in the command prompt that you opened before.

Open the <synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\portal\sql\portal-tables.sql and <synergy-workspace>\e2demo\synergy\liferay\portal\sql\create-*.sql.

You will find that the scripts have been suitably modifled.

For the changes to be reflected on the DB (could be MySQL, HSQL, etc),
drop the existing tables under lPortal database if any, and re-start the server.
The ontologyId column would be added to the BlogsEntry Table and BlogsEntryOntologyMapping table would have been created.

Extending Project WebSynergy's tables is as simple as this. You can extend this example to any other feature like wiki, bookmarks, etc.

 

In this screencast, you will learn how to:

1. Perform human workflow interaction with Java Composite Application Platform Suite workflow engine
2. Add SAW plug-in in NetBeans IDE,
3. Create a simple web application using the drag and drop features in SAW plug-in 
4. Create a simple a simple SAW portlet, which lists tasks based on task ID
   

The community feature of Project WebSynergy has been semantically enabled. This is a preview version of that.
This is taking the first step towards Web3.0 enablement.

So whats the Semantic Web ??
The semantic web is an evolving extension of the world wide web, in which web content can be expressed not only in a natural language but also in a format that can be read and used by machines for processing the information. It is w3c recommendation.

As a human when we write and read a blob of text, we know what it means but a machine reading a bunch of characters has no idea as to what it means. 

For the machine to be as intelligent as humans to decipher similar information from the text, there has to be some kind of information that the machine has to be provided with. This "extra" information is traditionally provided as meta-data in the form of tags, microformats or some other means. A much more structured and scientific way of applying metadata to a blurb of text is via what is called an ontology.

The community feature of Project WebSynergy allows you to add blog entries, wiki pages and message boards.

Refer to my blog on how to create a community in Project WebSynergy.
For an idea of what a Semantic Community Portal is, see here.

In a Project WebSynergy community, when the user creates a blog entry or a wiki page, he/she can optionally associate it with an ontology element (which acts as the metadata).
When the user views the blog entry, the other semantically related blog entries and wiki pages are displayed. The search for the related entires is not a key word search, but a semantic search done by the reasoner. The semantic reasoner infers the related ontology elements and we can see the blog entries and wiki pages for which  the related ontology elements have been applied to.

An example of the Semantic Community Portal is shown in the screen-casts.

 This blog describes the steps to create a community in Project WebSynergy.

1. Login as admin@example.com/admin into Project WebSynergy
   Move your mouse over the "Welcome Admin User" message and click on Add Application
2. In the Add Application window that shows up, select the Communities under Community Section. You can also type "communities" in the search content text box. Click on "Add" or drag and drop the portlet into one of your tabs. The communitiy portlet is now added to your tab.
   
3. Click on Add Community button.
4. Enter name (say Synergy) and click on Save. The community is created with the name that you specified.
   Click on "Available Communities" sub-tab.
5. For the community that you just created, click on the "Actions" button and select "Manage Pages".
   Enter name for the community page (say MySynergyPage ) and click on "Add Page".
6. Click on View Pages.
   To this community page, you can add the any  portlets. For eg.
       Blog Portlet
       Blogs Aggregator Portlet
       Wiki Portlet
       Message Boards Portlet
   
7. All these portlets are available under the Colloboration section in Add Application window

The expense-report widget, that is delivered as a part of the Project WebSynergy bundle, models a typical workflow scenario  where SAW (Simple API for Workflow) could be used. In an organization, employees raise expense reports and submit them to the managers to be approved or rejected. Once submitted, the report triggers a workflow process(in a workflow engine like JavaCAPS), and becomes a pending task for the associated manager. When the manager approves/rejects the report, the report goes to the next step in the workflow process.

This widget has been integrated with a simple JavaCAPS workflow process. If a workflow engine is unavailable, the SAW calls to the  Workflow engine can be disabled using the preferences. If the call to the workflow engine is enabled without configuring the engine, it results in a system error.

 In addition to Workflow, this widget has the following features: 

•  JMaki - Uses JMaki Yahoo Datatable
  

•  Usage of ServeResource feature of JSR286 portlets for Ajax requests (For Displaying Report Details)

Click here to know more about this widget....

Here is a step-by-step screencast showcasing the widget.

There is a preview version of the WebSynergy plug-in available at Portal Pack project site. This NetBeans plug-in supports portlet development and deployment on the new WebSynergy and also works with Liferay. For more details read here...

ProjectWebSynergy, will redifine the term portal. It will be a widget platform and will natively support other programming and web technologies, like Ruby and PHP. Java, Ruby and PHP widgets not only co-exist on a portal page, but also inter-communicate. And all this is made so easy using Portal Pack NetBeans plugins.

For more on this, read here. But wait..., if seeing is believing, visit us at the JavaONE 2008 booth if you are in San Francisco or the Bay area.