The Portlet 2.0 specification (aka. JSR 286) is now final (see vote). The Proposed Final Draft is now available and should be very close to the Final Final Spec. Sun has support for it in the NetBeans Portal Pack (Blog Entry, Article, download), and will be in Portal Server 7.2, both based on the Open Source Portal-Container project. All these are supported on GlassFish.

And Liferay has also announced it will support Portlet 2.0 in Liferay 5.0 (Support Case)... and Liferay is also Supported on GlassFish :-)

I started tracking Liferay Portal after they recently added a GlassFish bundle that has good download stats and TSS has a thread asking for Experience with Liferay. I poked around a bit and here are some Liferay exammples: EducaMadrid (Description, Portal), GoodWill Industries (Description, Portal), Christian Science Monitor (Profile, Portal), Pantech (info, site) and AutoZone (info, site). Do you have experience to share using Liferay?

A follow up to Last Week's Post on Liferay 4.4 on GlassFish. Brian Chan - the Liferay architect - has some nice words about GlassFish (see blog) and the download numbers (SF download page) are looking pretty good.

At the time of writing this note, download numbers are: • geronimo - 307 • glassfish - 900 • jboss - 560 • jonas - 44 • pramati - 25 • tomcat - 3409

Note that Tomcat is the "preferred download" and it is displayed in the front page.

Prashant Dighe has updated the Portal Post with an article on integrating Liferay Portal with OpenSSO on GlassFish. This allows OpenSSO to handle authentication for Liferay and could be extended to handle SSO across various portlets and applications. A future may allow Identity Based Content Delivery from Liferay, ensuring what a person is presented in Liferay is dependent on a viewer's organizations, roles or groups.

A tip from Ajit: Installing OpenPortal on SSL instance of GFv2

Sleep clearly hasn't been a recent priority for members of the OpenPortal project. At JavaOne, they announced the availability of the Sun Java System Portal Server source code in a read-only form. And now just a few weeks later, they've completed the next step and put fully buildable and installable code into the project's Subversion repository at portal.dev.java.net.

Want more info? See Tom's blog for some interesting stats on the project's scope and Greg's for some additional perspective and a direct pointer to the code. Also, don't forget to keep an eye on the "The Portal Post" blog for the latest project news.

Following on the heels of Part 1 and Part 2 of the Portal Open Source Article Series, Deepak and Marina have put out the next one - Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 3: Portlet Container. The article describes the Portlet Container Project's goals, contribution guidelines, and future directions. Also summarized are the capabilities, design, and distribution of Portlet Container version 1.0. Further, this article explains how to install and deploy Portlet Container 1.0.

In general, these articles underscore how the collection of modules brewing under the Portal Project aim to foster the ubiquity of portal technology by providing components that are consumable, embeddable, and integratable in numerous environments, including portal servers and development tools.

The Portlet Challenge Contest announced previously is now coming to a close. Deadline for submissions is EOD PST March 27th, 2007. So if you have an interest in Portlets, or for that matter iPods (more than one is up for grabs), or better still both!, you may want to consider making a submission.

Wesley and Marina have done a complete refresh of the popular "Introducing Java Portlet Specifications.." article. It now not only covers the Java Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR 168), but also takes a peek at the ongoing work on the upcoming Java Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). In addition, it walks through a sample Weather Portlet tying together leverage of the Portlet Repository Project, the Portlet Container Project, and the NetBeans Portal Pack Project.

So check it out -- Introducing Java Portlet Specifications: JSR 168 and JSR 286

If you tend to dabble with Portals/Portlets, and are not aware of the NetBeans Portal Pack Project, or not had a chance to take it for a spin yet, you may want to consider doing so.

The project got started a few months back and has made steady progress. It currently has plug-ins for developing JSR168 compliant Portlets, and some additional ones that allow direct deploy/undeploy to/from the Open Source Portlet Container implementation, as well as Sun's commercial grade Portal Server 7. The Portal Pack plug-ins recently got added to the NetBeans Auto-Update Center Beta as well.

Also related - if you need an easy-to-use, lightweight runtime to debug/test your portlets, you can use the Portal Pack plug-ins in conjunction with the Portlet Driver that is part of the Portlet Container Project. The Portlet Container and Driver are conveniently available via the Application Platform SDK Update 2 Release.

The Portlet Repository project has announced a Portlet Developer Challenge - an exciting opportunity for portlet developers to win an iPod. More details can be found at the contest home page. Also check out The Portal Post for current and up-to-date information on the Portal Project.

The WSRP Project (part of the Portal) is nearing their first Milestone late in December. That release plans to include support for these WSRP features: Producer, Consumer, Test Driver, Admin Portlet and MBean. The WSRP support builds on the Portlet Container and uses the GlassFish Server. Check the Portlet Getting Started document, the Install and User Guide for WSRP, and Rajesh's and Karthik's blogs.

A couple of recent additions to the Portal Project. First, Dean reports on the availability of the JAAS Portlet a new addition to the Porlet Repository (Home Page, overview article) that uses JAAS to authenticate the user against a plain text password file. Separatedly, Satya reports on the PortalPack project, which is building support for Portlets and Portals on top of NetBeans (see Project Page).

Little by little, the portal project is becoming a useful portal project; Jeff is not an impartial observer but he likes it Better than Pluto.

The Portlet Container project (sub-project of the Portal project) is speeding along.. Infact, quite literally. As part of milestone v1, the project has produced a "Driver" that provides an environment to interact with portlets running in the Portlet Container.

For more details, check out Deepak's commentary on the Driver (Update: in particular, you may want to sample the cool demo).

Part 2 of an article on opensource portal and portlet development is available now on Sun Developer Network. The article's focus is on the new opensource repository for portlets on java.net. As the popularity and resources of opensouce portlets grows, users of portals will gain more and more benefit at a higher and higher ROI of their portal projects. What a great idea for opensource participation. Contributing and sharing portlets which provide simple deploy-and-play functions for portal's and portal pages.