In the past few months, The Portal Post has made a lot of progress. We have grown our readership and contributors by many fold. We are now increasing our reach even more with translations into other languages. Thanks to our brilliant team members, Takashi Komazaki and Leon Fan from the Portal L10N team, The Portal Post is now being translated in Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

I have added links to the Japanese and Simplified Chinese blogs on the right hand side menu bar. Hopefully this trend will continue and we'll be able to say Hola, BonJour, Buon Giorno, Zdravstvuite and many more Hellos to The Portal Post readers.

Thanks again to Koma-san and Leon for being the  first.
 

Portal Server 7.1 Update 1 is a maintenance release addressing major bug fixes from the previous releases along with some significant new features and enhancements. In particular, this release addresses some of the gaps specifically around community functionality. The new feature set includes the ability to create private  communities, allowing cross community search and management of communities via admin console. Other notable features include the AJAX portal container and the ability to create blogs.

For Solaris and Linux platforms, the release is available both in the form of an upgrade (via patches) and as a fresh install.

For Windows platform, we have taken a simple approach and are making this release available only in the form of a  pre-configured install, without an upgrade option. The main reason for taking this approach is that the earlier release of Portal Server 7.1 on Windows (part of Java Enterprise System 5 bundle) was somewhat difficult to install and required quite a few workarounds to configure the product.

This release simplifies the install experience and speeds up the evaluation and development  process. It is highly recommended that the Windows release should mainly be used for development and  evaluation purposes. 

The Portal Server 7.1 Update 1 release is available for download at this location.

Also note that the Java Application Platform SDK streamlines enterprise application development and improves developer productivity. A new version, Update 3 Preview 2,  is now available for download. In this release the Portlet Container has been updated from the earlier 1.0 beta version to 1.0 FCS.

Portal Server is now localized in the OpenPortal source repository!

Today we have checked-in the localization files for 7 languages in the OpenPortal repository. You can check out the latest Portal Server sources - the localization files are in the location - .../openportal/portal/l10n/src  

Portal Server is localized in German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean. 

The localized Portal Server is simpler and easier to use... To provide a seamless experience to localization users, all the l10n files are bundled in the core Portal install units (pkgs, rpms etc). There are no separate l10n install units.

To find out more, visit the OpenPortal Localization wiki

We now have the JSF Portlet Bridge jars available on the java.net maven2 repository.

If you use Maven2 to build JSF Portlet webapplications, you can reference the JSF Portlet Bridge library in your pom.xml as shown below. After the war is built, it will contain jsf-portlet.jar

So insert the following into your pom.xml --

Under <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>maven2-repository.dev.java.net</id>
            <name>Java.net Repository for Maven</name>
            <url>https://maven2-repository.dev.java.net/nonav/repository</url>
         </repository>       

Under <dependencies>
      <dependency>
            <groupId>com.sun.faces.portlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>jsf-portlet</artifactId>
            <version>1.2.1</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
      </dependency> 

The current versions are 1.2.1 and 1.1.5

Highlights of this build are support for Sun Application Server 9.1, GlassFish V2, integration with SAW, Mirage, AES encryption for SRA,  new consolidated sampleportals and much more.

Checkout Getting started with OpenPortal and follow the Install Instructions and Release notes to try the latest B5 build.

We've released JSF Portlet Bridge 1.2.1 and 1.1.5. The changelog contains issues resolved as well as any new features added.

If you find any issues or have any feedback for features, etc., please let us know!

To know more about JSF Portlet Bridge, you can read the article JavaServer Faces Technology-Based Portlet Bridge

A new version of Eclipse Portal Pack is uploaded on the Eclipse Portalpack site. I have tried to add support in this version for handling actions in portlets easier. The plugin can be downloaded from the Documents and Files sections of the Eclipse Portalpack site.

View the announcement here and try it out. You can also read more about it and how to use this new version on my personal blog.

SAW an abbreviation for Simple API for Workflow, is LIVE! Check it out here.
SAW is an open source effort towards making a generic workflow API scalable across multiple workflow engines. The default implementation will be supported with the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite.

For details, read my blog here. Stay tuned on announce@saw.dev.java.net for further announcements.

The Mirage Project site got launched today on java.net. Check it out here

Mirage is an open source project which aims to deliver a professional open source content management system based on the content repository Java Content Repository (JCR) viz. JSR-170.

You can read more about it at my blog here.

  Sun announces the creation of the OpenPortal community which will focus on the development of standards-based enterprise-class portal technologies. You can access the OpenPortal community on java.net.

Sun recently contributed the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 source into the OpenPortal community.  The source code is a read-only, non-buildable version that you can download from the OpenPortal Downloads page.  A buildable version of the source code will be available later this month, the Roadmap page has more details.

The Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 includes features such as

• identity-based content delivery,
  
• community framework (including wiki and blog),
  
• plugins for portlet development in Eclipse and NetBeans,
  
• and much more. 
  

Moving forward, all Sun Java System Portal Server development, including buildable source and binaries, will be available in the OpenPortal community.

The latest stable nightly binaries of the Portlet Container and WSRP projects are now available, These binaries are tested against each other for any integration issues.

This Portlet Container stable binary fixes integration issues over the milestone 1 release to support WSRP.  So if your intent  is to use WSRP functionality over the Portlet Container, it is recommended you download this binary rather than the milestone 1 binary.

For more information please refer to the download page. This page also has links to the install and user guides for the respective projects.

Portlet Container 1.0 FCS is now available as part of the Java Application Platform SDK Update 3 Preview release. You can download the same from here.  Here are some links to related resources

• Release Notes
• Installation Instructions
• Screencast: Learn how to deploy and test portlets using the Portlet Container
• Article: Understanding the Portlet Container 1.0 Software and Deploying Portlets

The Netbeans Portlet Plug-ins help developers to develop, deploy and test portlets on to the Portlet Container 1.0.  There are new versions of the Portlet Plug-ins that are now available that work with the above Portlet Container version. The Netbeans Portlet Plug-ins are available as the part of  Java EE 5 Tools Bundle Update 3 Preview.

Checkout Deepak's  and Satya's blog for more details.