The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets TC has recently approved Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification v2.0 as a Committee Draft and is available for public review. The public review starts from 31 October 2007, and ends 15 November 2007.

This specification was previously submitted for a 60-day public review on 24 July 2007, this 15-day review is limited in scope to changes made from the previous review. All changes are highlighted.

The specification document and related files are available here.

Highlighted PDF copy is available here:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-spec-pr-04-highlight.pdf


The schema and wsdl files are available at:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-bindings-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-extra-pr-04.xsd
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-interfaces-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-service-pr-04.wsdl
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrp/v2/wsrp-2.0-types-pr-04.xsd

Those exploring the OpenPortal community will be interested in reading this articulation (by Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer) of the diverse perspectives that must be grasped in order to understand the dynamics that drive open source --

The Meanings and Motivations of Open-Source Communities

Some time back we had decided to open source some on the key components of the Sun Java Portal Server product in a piece-meal fashion. The idea was to enable those components to be consumed by other communities or software products (refer this article for the goals).

Since then we have open sourced the Portlet Container (based on the JSR168 standard) implementation, the WSRP implementation, the JSFPortlet bridge, and also created some new innovative projects such as Portal Pack (NetBeans and Eclipse), SAW and Mirage. And to further walk the talk, I am happy let you know that some of these components have already been consumed back by the enterprise class open source Portal Server implementation in the OpenPortal community.

A successful open source community is about adopting other communities and getting adopted by other communities, I would like to welcome other communities and software products who believe in open source to come and look at what we have to offer as part of the components mentioned above.

To go back to the article that states the goals of the OpenPortal community --

The objectives for the Portal Server open-source initiative are threefold:

- Expose Portal Server's mature and proven enterprise-class capabilities to the community and evolve it there through active participation from the community of developers, users, partners, and like-minded individuals.

- Build composable, decoupled, and lightweight components that can be used by the developer community and other projects, for example, components that serve as development or test runtimes in tools.

- Collaborate with other portal, middleware, or similar open-source efforts in the software universe for the benefit of the community.

Note: Please stay tuned for news on JSR286 and WSRP 2.0.

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

Portal Server community administration can be done from either the Portal Server Management Console or through command-line interface (CLI). 

For the Portal Server 7.1u1 release, the command-line utilities for community administration was consolidated into a technical note.

 Each entry has the command (long and short formats), description, syntax, and options.

Instructions to administer communities from the Portal Server Management Console is available in the online help.

A technical article is now available in BigAdmin on administering Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) for Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 written by Sunil Bhaskaran. You can also find this information in a WSRP chapter in the Sun Java System Portal Server Administration Guide.

Another technical article by Rajesh Thiagarajan and Marina Sum, in a four part series titled Open-Source Portal Initiative, "describes the WSRP Project's system and deployment architectures, its build and deployment processes, and the procedure for creating remote portlet windows."

 [Click image to see enlarged view]

The past two iterations of work on the Portal Server Admin console have been an interesting journey in design work.

We started by teasing the Portal Server Console out of the Identity Console. Endless meetings with white boards filled with diagrams of everything that needed to be presented to the user in the console, and how they should be grouped. Denim was my friend those days. At the end of all this we had a spanking new console with a navigation scheme that had a good amount of "scent". What is scent you say? It is a concept that Jared Spool uses, and that I happen to like. The idea is that a well designed website should let users know that they are on the right track. The 7.0 console had the ability to lead you to the area that you wanted to go, and to find your way back there with ease the next time you wanted to.

The next iteration of work was adding the Visual Display Design Tool. A Direct Manipulation Interface that lets the Administrator interact directly with what they are working on - a portal page. This advances the UI further along the continuum of task awareness (note: I did not say task based, task centric etc.. I should blog sometime about my reasons for avoiding those terms...). One of the unique tools in this round of work was comics to tell stories. It was a lot of fun to do, and was a lot more effective in ensuring a shared understanding of the work. Plus it was a lot of fun to put together!

Cross Posted from : http://blogs.sun.com/realDesign/

As part of the OpenPortal project we strive to make the UI as visually appealing as possible and Portal Server 7.2 is full of advancements in this area.  Why?  We want you to touch it, feeling connected to your portal services.

That means we do a ton of browser testing via our great QA team to ensure our UI is consistent across browsers.

And now thanks to Parallels with Coherence,  UI development and testing should be a whole lot easier.  With it, I can run all the major browsers simultaneously and see changes instantly without switching machines/keyboards.

Just one small thing we do to help ensure a better user experience for you. 

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.

Quick FYI -- The tag cloud / top tags section on the blog has been moved to the top on the right nav bar. Also, the tags for each entry on the blog have been reviewed and refreshed. We hope that the tags now better serve locatability of the desired topic/content. 

Any comments/suggestions to further enhance the experience on this blog most appreciated.

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

The OpenPortal project has an entry on the Ohloh web site for tracking information related to the OpenPortal community. This includes information about committers, code size and makeup, and licensing. If you use software from any of the OpenPortal projects, please add OpenPortal to your stack on Ohloh. We would also welcome any user reviews.