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.

Everyone knows what is a blog.

 Q: Then what is this Blog Portlet in Portal Server?

A: Blog Portlet allows portal users to manage weblog posts from a portal page. You can create, edit, and delete weblog entries. Additionally, this portlet provides a simplified interface for creating weblogs and weblog user accounts.

Q: This is exciting, I want to read more about this Blog Portlet.

A: Sure you can. We have published a Technical Note on Blog Portlet recently. I am sure it has all the information you want.

The public review draft of JSR 286 was released recently and the details of that can be found in Deepak's blog. Markup caching has been a part of JSR 168, but it had its limitations. JSR 286 addresses these limitations by introducing "Validation" caching and "Public" caching scope among other things. The details and the comparison of the JSR 168 and JSR 286 caching mechanism are available in my blog entry.

These improvements will be part of the OpenPortal Portlet Container soon and the performance gain thus obtained would truly be tangible :)

The public review draft of JSR 286 was released recently.  

It includes the following major new features --

• Events -  Enable portlets to communicate with each other through sending and receiving events.   
• Public render parameters - Enable portlets to specify which render parameters they can share with other portlets.
• Resource serving - Enables portlets to serve resources within the portlet context.
• Portlet Filters - Allows on the fly transformation of the content of portlet requests and responses.

 See some commentary on the Eventing feature. The other features will be covered in a series of upcoming blog entires.

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
  

Mahipalsinh and Marina have just published a new SDN article titled -- "Configuring Portlets for Internationalization and Localization"

The article uses a sample portlet to describe the procedures for internationalization, localization, and deployment of internationalized portlets on Portal Server. That is, you learn how to display portlet content in various languages and how to add new language support to existing portlets.

Note: for all Portal Server related articles, you can use the "article" tag on The Portal Post.

If you want to build a rich user interface web application that requires several state changes, spans multiple business processes and requires complex data handling at the back-end and still want to give the users a really rich and consistent experience (no refreshes!), then do have a look at Flex as I believe that it is definitely a good choice.

Refer Sandeep's blog to get a fair idea regarding flex and it's advantages. After that if you are ready to try your hands on it, have a look at my blog where I have explained this with an example.

After receiving quite a few queries from users, I thought it was prudent to post the various ways of deploying JSR-168 portlets on the OpenPortal Portlet Container. The use of GUI provided by the driver, the CLI provided by the ant task and the auto-deployment feature for drag and drop deployment, are all very easy to use and provide flexibility to the developers. These are elaborated in detail in this blog post.

 So start creating those portlets and get them up and running in a matter of seconds.

Here is a new voice-over screencast that demonstrates the IPC StoryBoard feature for NetBeans 5.5/5.5.1 IDE. In this screencast, I have explained the IPC StoryBoard feature with the help of a fund transfer portlet application created in NetBeans 5.5.1 IDE, following the procedure in Uma's tutorial.

Thanks to Satya, Vihang, and Deepak for providing feedback. I would also like to thank Anjana Rudra for graciously lending her voice and Manu Samuel from the IEC Media design team for the production support.

Watch the screencast and look out for more in the future.

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.

The Java Community Process(JCP) has recently approved JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0 as public review draft and is available for public review. The public review starts from 24 Jul, 2007 and ends 27 Aug, 2007.

The specification document and related files are available here.

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.

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

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