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.
 

 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

To commemorate India’s 60 years of Independence, we have announced a unique contest today, aptly named “Code for Freedom”.

Open to undergraduate and graduate students in any college/university accredited by the Government of India, the contest invites contributions to 5 Open Source projects namely OpenSolaris, NetBeans, Project GlassFish, Apache Derby and OpenPortal and will run until January 2008. The winners of the contest are set to win Laptops, iPods and every contributor gets a T-shirt and certificate from Sun.

You can find more information at the Code For Freedom site.

As you have come to this blog, I am assuming you are interested more in an open source enterprise portal - and we will be very happy to help you in any way we can. You can contact us at users@portal.dev.java.net.

If you want to contribute to the development of the OpenPortal project, you can find details over here. 

If you want to create cool JSR168 based portlets, please check Satya's blog to learn about some easy steps on how to do portlet development.

The Portal Pack provides a server plug-in for Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 (including Update 1). Using this plug-in you can develop and deploy your portlet application on a remote Sun Java System Portal Server directly from your NetBeans IDE. If you are wondering how to start using this plug-in for your Portal Server installation, you may want to go through the following documents --

• Configuring the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.x Plug-in

• User guide for Portal Pack Plug-in for Sun Java System Portal Server 7
  

If you where using NetBeans 5.5 previously and then switched to the new NetBeans 6.0 Milestone 10 version, don't be surprised if you don't find the “Portlet Application” option while creating a New Project (after installing the portlet plugin from http://portalpack.netbeans.org/)

In NetBeans 6.0 the Portlet Application is part of the “Web Application”. So what you need to do is to create a “Web Application” and in the wizard under the Frameworks panel select “Portlet Support” to create a Portlet Application.

The NetBeans Visual Web Pack helps developers create JSF based web application using drag and drop support for JavaServer Faces components. The current version of Visual Web Pack doesn't have support for JSF based Portlet Applications. Most probably this functionality will be addressed in the future version of Visual Web Pack. But many users who have been migrating from Sun Studio Creator to NetBeans 6.0 are asking about this feature in various forums. So I spent some time to find out if it's possible to build JSF Portlet with the current version of Visual Web Pack and Portal Pack plug-in.

With a few manual steps you can actually get JSF Portlet Builder functionality using NetBeans Visual Web Pack and Portal Pack Plug-in togather. For more details read here. 

A new version of Eclipse Portal Pack is uploaded on the Eclipse Portalpack site.

To learn how to use this new version to easily add portlet action support to your portlet visit my blog.

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.

The Portal Pack 1.3 Beta is now available for download. It has a new feature IPC Story Board which provides  tools support for the Eventing (also referred to as Inter-Portlet Communication) feature supported by Sun Java System Portal Server/OpenPortal Portlet Container.

This version of the Portal Pack is supported on NetBeans 5.5/5.5.1. Check out my blog for a tutorial on how to use this new feature in your NetBeans IDE.

Coordination remains one of the most talked about topics with respect to portlets. And one of the popular means of enabling portlet coordination is via the event model.

The Eventing (also referred to as Inter-Portlet Communication) feature in the Sun Java System Portal Server as well as the decoupled Portlet Container component built out of the OpenPortal community now has tools support in the form of an IPC Story Board feature in the NetBeans Portal Pack.

Check out Satya's blog entry introducing this feature, and especially the screencast that illustrates usage via a sample Shopping Cart application.  

Also note that the upcoming new versions of the Portal Standards, Portlet 2.0 (JSR286) and WSRP 2.0, will provide support for  portlet coordination through more than one mechanism including events. Support for those will also similarly make it's way into the Portal Pack.

Portal Pack 2.0 preview is now available for download here.

Although this version has not introduced any functional changes in the serverplugin modules, there are few changes with respect to the portlet builder (Generic Portlets) module. Unlike the earlier version, in this version of the Portal Pack, there is no separate "Portlet Application" project type. This version of Portal Pack supports Portlet applications through the web framework. Hence, "Portlet Support" can be added to a new/existing web application through the web framework. In other words, one can say that an existing/new web application can be extended to support Portlets inside it.

To learn how to create a portlet application using Portal Pack 2.0 preview click here.