Project WebSynergy has enjoyed a couple of recent positive developments: First, Adam Bien is a consultant and book author and has blogged about GlassFish in the past. Recently Adam blogged about the prospects of WebSynergy becoming the killer GlassFish Portal Server - I happen to share this outlook. He was right about GlassFish being the Killer AppServer after all!

Second, Sandeep headed up an effort to get some university students engaged with Sun's open source communities and projects - specifically, GlassFish, WebSynergy (and its NetBeans components). It was a big success, and as part of the larger GlassFish Community, students submitted their project as GAP entries. In addition, this project garnered awareness in their respective academic groups. Kudos to the teams!

JSR 286 aka Portlet 2.0 has been made an official release. I mentioned this in passing a few days ago but wanted to provide more detail. This spec has over 2.5 years of expertise applied to it, and has a number of great features that Deepak has detailed [eventing, params, resource serving, filters, caching, taglibs].

Commercial product support includes Sun's Portal Server 7.2, and Liferay Portal (which also runs on GlassFish. In addition, Project WebSynergy includes support and tooling for creating of 286-compliant applications.

Congrats to the spec team!

JSR 286 Final Release was made available last week. Hot on its heels is the release of the Sun-led open source implementation, OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0 [Download].

This container is consumed by both Sun's Portal Server 7.2, as well as Project WebSynergy (using Liferay Portal).

Deepak's announcement provides more links, and there is a nice article and screencast demonstrating how to use the container.

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. I also wrote up some additional detail and graphics to depict the makeup of this release.

Looking ahead, Project WebSynergy [earlier post, 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. WebSynergy is now part of the GlassFish community. Looking forward to seeing this partnership in action!

Sun announced Project WebSynergy two weeks ago, during JavaOne, and, since then, the team has written a number of Posts@BSC; I'll try to start catching up. A recent post explains how to configure WebSynergy to use MySQL; the detailed instructions are at here, and there is also an associated Screencast. Thanks to Gopal for the tip

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.