Hal Stern's latest Innovating@Sun podcast interview features Peter Reiser discussing Community Equity, a social value system that measures one's online social capital. This system has been successfully used internally for over a year and is now available for general use. The Webspace team has also made an alpha integration available for GlassFish Webspace Server via its Update Center-based developer repository, enabling portal user social capital to be accurately measured (You may also remember the CommunityOne Webcast and presentation).

You can check out the spec, participate at the Kenai project site, or follow the project on Twitter.

Future works in progress include semantic integration with Kiwi, and an implementation of the Activity Streams spec (enabling deeper integration with Facebook, MySpace, StatusNet, and other social platforms).

As part of the the WebSpace Server 10 release, Ed Ort (from java.sun.com) and I sat down to do a deep dive webcast for GlassFish WebSpace Server. Parts 1 and 2 were originally published a few weeks ago. Now, parts 3 and 4 are now available and cover development tooling, and end user social collaboration techniques. Enjoy!

Portal Development (especially with WebSpace) is made even easier with the recent release of Portal Pack 3.0.1 [download]. Several new features are added, including theme development (including code completion for Velocity), directory deployment/deploy-on-save for rapid testing, Liferay service builder support, and more. for questions and tips, make sure to visit one of many of the community venues, including the mailing lists or #webspace IRC Channel, or contribute on the growing Wiki.

Also, don't miss the Portal Pack and WebSpace teams at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

On the heels of the successful 10.0 release, the WebSpace server team brings you another series of community and milestone builds for the next release, 10.1. The first in this series, WebSpace server 10.1 Community Build 1, is now available. Just like the 10.0 development effort, this series gives you a chance to exercise new features and updates that will be in the 10.1 release, leading up to the final release. You can expect a number of Community and Milestone builds to follow. for questions and tips, make sure to visit us at one of many of the community venues, including the forum or #webspace IRC Channel, or contribute on the growing Wiki (more on this later!).

Also, don't miss us at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

Rajesh and team are hard at work plugging in more JMX monitoring features in WebSpace Server and Liferay (see the detailed proposal). This will give administrators a nice overview of performance metrics, fault diagnostics, and in general keeping WebSpace running smoothly. Speaking of performance, Srikanth has also written up an integration of WebSpace Server with Apache Solr, which is recommended for use with GlassFish clusters. The WebSpace Wiki is a great source of material like this for developers and administrators.

Apologies for neglecting the portal space, after the big release we've been heads down keeping up with demand. However, there are a lot of new happenings in the WebSpace!

There have been several new items in the development space. Cheten has done a nice writeup of support for Liferay Hooks Plugins in WebSpace's Portal Pack. In addition to hooks, work is almost complete on the Theme Builder, allowing custom themes to be developed in NetBeans and deployed to WebSpace Server and Liferay. Combining these with existing features like eventing (Vikas has done a nice writeup on this), you can do all of your WebSpace Server development without leaving the comfort of your IDE.

Also, don't forget that Portal Pack is also supported on Eclipse!

We announced the Sun GlassFish Web Space Server during the Portfolio launch, but I forgot to mention the community site. The site is WebSpace(.dev.java.net) and includes four main entry points: Start, Download, Use and Communicate. The main mailing list is USERS. Enjoy!

Prashant has developed a very interesting combination of Portlet and JavaFX technologies - Amphibious Portlets. Watch and learn as Prashant shows you how to make JavaFX portlets swim on the WebSynergy desktop and on your OS desktop. Very slick and a very useful combination of enterprise and RIA!

Project WebSynergy continues its march to its first commercial release early next year. Last Friday, the team released its Milestone 3 [download]. Major changes or additions since the last milestone include: GlassFish V2 & V3 bundles, much improved documentation, better samples, WSRP-Database integration, jBPM Workflow support, an OpenOffice plugin, Eclipse support, and tons of new features in Portal Pack in support of WebSynergy features. This will be the last Milestone before the upcoming commercial release.

Check out Rajesh on WSRP 2.0 (now part of the App Platform SDK), Jennifer on M3, and Siddesh on setting up WebSynergy with Oracle.

WebSynergy has enjoyed some positive press recently. David Heffelfinger wrote up a nice piece on WebSynergy and OpenPortal. Kristian on WebSynergy: portal development renewed. Last but not least, Sun was once again recognized as a Leader in Gartner's Portal Magic Quadrant. Also, don't miss GlassFish Day on Thursday. We'll be there!

WebSynergy and the associated Portal Pack 3.0 continue to add features as part of its partnership with Liferay. Frerk Meyer in a recent blog post talks about the addition of Groovy support in Portal Pack, which allows one to write JSR 286 portlets in Groovy and deploy to WebSynergy. Satya provides More detail about Portal Pack 3.0 and its multiple language support for portlet authoring.

WebSynergy already supports Ruby and PHP. Stay tuned for more support as newer community and stable builds of WebSynergy [download] and Portal Pack [download] are released.

Project WebSynergy Stable Build 2 [download] is now available! This build represents a significant milestone for the team and establishes a lot of the groundwork for the future features. In addition, summer vacations and name searches have delayed us somewhat, but we are very close to getting the external community site established (see my detailed blog post for details). Future features include exposing more Presence features, authorization and identity-based content delivery via OpenSSO integration, expanded CMS features, and IPS/Update Center support (e.g.by making a v3 module). Development tools for WebSynergy are also rapidly evolving to track the latest features in WebSynergy: Portal Pack Milestone 1 for NetBeans 6.5 is now out. The project is shaping up to really be a revolution in Sun portal. Nice work!

The OpenPortal WSRP team have integrated their WSRP 2.0 consumer into Liferay Portal. This feature has been highly anticipated since WSRP 1.0 support was pulled earlier this year due to complexities related to JSR 286/Portlet Container support. This feature allows apps hosted on remote sites to be presented through the Liferay portal desktop. In addition, a new WSRP Consumer Administration app has been added. Rajesh shows example of how to use it in his recent blog entry. You can also check out the JIRA tracking issue.

In the more general portal space, Project WebSynergy should be launching its external site in concert with its next Stable Build (SB2), due out in the next few days. I have written a detailed description of the intended community structure, and roadmap and will continue to keep you updated on our progress!

We announced WebSynergy at JavaOne; we were expecting to launch the public site with transparent builds shortly after that but the end of (our fiscal) year and the summer have slowed us down. I think we will soon be able to show public progress; in the meantime we are making internal progress, together with the Liferay team and with add-ons.

As an example of the type of synergy across our projects, Ajit describes how to Integrating WebSynergy with OpenSSO on GFv3, showing how to download and assemble the pieces and how to configure OpenSSO. Of course, the actual Sun product would come with good ease-of-use for all these, and other, pieces.

Yesterday, Liferay released version 5.1.0 of Liferay Portal [download]. This latest release incorporates a number of new features, including features and bugfixes contributed from Project WebSynergy (e.g. the portlet container). Future releases will continue to incorporate components such as Mirage CMS API into Liferay Journal, WSRP 2.0, SAW, and presence components (all of which are present in the foundation of Project WebSynergy). As of 5.1.0, Liferay is now bundled with GlassFish v2 and GlassFish v3 [Download Now]! It's a lightweight (33% reduction in size), platform-neutral download that demonstrates the power and modularity of GlassFish v3, with a real-world app. Kudos to the Sun and Liferay team!

Recent developments in Project WebSynergy: both WebSynergy and Liferay Portal now share an identical Portlet Container [download]. This should enhance portability when dealing with optional portlet features, as well as making migration from previous Sun Portal releases easier. There is also a nice article at TSS on JSR 286 features. JSR 286 was recently approved, and is supported by WebSynergy and Liferay Portal. Manish goes into greater detail in his blog. What's also good to see are references to GlassFish (Ok, they still call it App Server, but the link is good) at the bottom of the article.