Sun GlassFish Web Space Server 10.0 has been released today [download].  It is Sun's next-generation portal server platform. It enables businesses large and small to pull together applications and content from a variety of Web-based and internal sources and present them as a unified, customizable portal on Web browsers, kiosks, and mobile devices.  It is part of a larger Portfolio of software being released today as part of the GlassFish Portfolio.

Web Space Server started out about a year ago with a partnership with Liferay Portal to join forces to develop the core portal in the Liferay community. Web Space Server is Sun's first product based on this effort and common code base. You may still run across instances of the term Project WebSynergy - this was Sun's internal codename for the project before it was released.

Standards such as JSR 168, JSR 286, JSR 170, and WSRP 2.0 provide a solid foundation on which to build a modern web 2.0 enterprise application platform, using lightweight web-oriented architectures, and powerful developer tools to create a rich ecosystem for developers, integrators, administrators, and now users to collaborate and innovate with.

A new user-oriented site webspace.dev.java.net  has been established.  This site will house information most useful to administrators and end users of Web Space Server, including download and documentation links, community support forums, email lists, wiki content, and other useful information.

New community builds and milestones of Web Space Server will continue to be released to deliver new features and fix bugs.  This release is marked 10.0 to indicate it is a (r)evolutionary step from previous portal efforts, such as Portal Server 7.2.

The WebSyner--err--Web Space team is proud to bring you this first release, and hope you will like it as much as we do!

Recently we have defined a common way to do I18n and L10n in WebSynergy. This process will be used for I18n/L10n during development of WebSynergy. It can also be used to develop new porlet with taking advantage of existing UI Tag lib and Language util class for I18n/L10n.

Details can be found on my personal blog entry .

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.

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!

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.
 

Here is a new voice-over screencast that demonstrates the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) feature in Sun Java System Portal Server. In this screencast, I have explained how to create a WSRP Producer, Consumer, and a channel/container to publish remote portlets in Sun Java System Portal Server.

The screencast also explains interoperability feature, by demonstrating how to consume remote portlets from Netunity producer in Sun Java System Portal Server.

Go through the screencast and watch this space for OpenPortal WSRP version 2.0 implementation screencast, soon.

 OpenPortal campaign @ Foss.IN's first day started with a bang at Bangalore. It was very well
received by the developer community. The BoF sessions were a hit which is evident from the fact that 2-3 BoF sessions needed to be conducted parallely.
OpenPortal team also gave a handout of all community projects under the OpenPortal umbrella. It also made a well-crafted survey received eagerly by the developer community. On the first day itself, we were able to collect around 80-90 responses.

The survey responses were very positive and almost everyone had something or the other to look forward to from Portal and wanted to at the least become an observer.

 BoF's gave a wonderful way of interacting with the community.

The enthusiasm received re-affirms the fact that the developer community and the market in general has been awaiting a cutting-edge Enterprise level OpenSource Portal Server.

Now FOSS.IN moves to penultimate day where we are trying our best to maintain the momentum.
 

Check out the BoF announcement booth which was marked as "BlockBuster"

I just created a new voice over screencast on how to develop portlets using PortalPack 2.0 Beta with NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 and GlassFish V2.
The screencast demonstrates how to develop a simple portlet using PortalPack and deploy it on OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0 Beta. Check it out

 
One of world's largest FOSS events, FOSS.IN 2007 is opening in Bangalore. Sun is a platinum sponsor of this event. Sun is participating in almost all the events throughout the five days of conference: Project days,Presentations Demos, Hack center, BoFs, Lightning talks
Click here for the official FOSS.IN page.

is also registering its presence via a host of demos and BoF sessions.Check out this blog for more details

Vihang was at Glassfish day in Beijing to talk about OpenPortal. His talk was well received and participants showed a lot of interest in OpenPortal's new features. You can read more here

1. Vihang's blog: OpenPortal@Beijing
2. Carla King's Blog
3. Arun Gupta's Blog

Mozilla Labs has an interesting technology - Prism - that aims to quickly bridge the gap between web applications and the computer desktop. Instead of trying to come up with a completely new presentation technology like Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX etc. they have a simple program called Prism that will allow any web application to run outside the browser as a desktop application, so that each web application runs in its own window. It isn't rocket science and there have been similar technologies in the past. But Prism is much more usable and easy to use. I use Prism to run my Gmail and Yahoo Mail as desktop windows. That way my Firefox is free for other stuff and next time I have to restart my browser (which I very frequently do because Firefox can leak memory like a sieve) I don't have to bring up Gmail and Yahoo Mail again. Also the performance of Firefox is not affected because of the email clients that are constantly open.

 There has always been a requirement to run JSR 168 portlets on the desktop as native desktop applications. Prism can be a great solution to do this in a simple and easy manner. Just double clicking on an icon on the desktop will bring up a JSR 168 Portlet running inside Prism. And with Google Gears we can perhaps even make the portlet work offline. :)
 

BEA Systems released their annual State of the Market Portal Report for 2007. The report is titled "State of the Portal Market 2007: Portals and The Power of Participation". The report says that "Portals remain a top priority for CIOs  in large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year". The report adds "portals remain ideal platforms for consolidating applications, helping enable the integration and reuse of existing systems and data, and helping companies introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies to their increasingly tech-savvy user communities."

Some key findings of the report are

• Market: The enterprise portal market continues to grow over nine percent annually, with an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2011.
• Audience expansion: Despite efforts to consolidate, the number of portals deployed in an enterprise is expanding. This expansion is not necessarily due to technical limitations of software but to the increasing number of audiences being supported by portals, and by the improved flexibility of portal technology as a framework to speed application development and deployment.
• Business and IT agility-BPM and SOA: The increased adoption of business process management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives are both driving portal usage. This is because portals already utilize many SOA principles and can deliver and manage premium interaction and contextual experiences.
• Business participation—Web 2.0 and the new enterprise: After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, leading-edge companies are embracing those principles for use in the enterprise. Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer.
• Segmentation: Portal vendors are expanding their offerings to take advantage of BPM, SOA and Web 2.0. Because of the loosely coupled aspects of those technologies, the leaders in the portal market are those that can be the most open while still offering enterprise-grade capabilities like security, branding, personalization and search.
• Benefits: In addition to the revenue-generating benefits reported by the studies, BEA portal customers report additional benefits ranging from increased employee productivity and efficiency, reduced support and service costs, increased customer loyalty, consolidation of IT infrastructure and lower operational costs via reduction in paper-based or manual processes.
• Deployment costs: For 77 percent of BEA portal customers, the cost of consulting services for deployment or customization of software was less than license costs, demonstrating the portal’s value as a rapid, flexible deployment vehicle for a broad range of company initiatives.