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!

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.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

A compilation of today's news of interest:

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!

Liferay has frequent releases each with multiple AppServers bundles so I've used the SourceForge Download Statistics to to create this Percentage Graph comparing 5 AppServers over 5 releases. The shelf-life varies across releases but percentages should be roughly comparable: GlassFish started with 3% and by now has 21%. Tomcat remains #1 with 61% - down from a peak of 80%.

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.

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!

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

Sun has joined the Liferay Community to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from Liferay and from OpenPortal, GlassFish, OpenSSO and other related projects (Press Release, FAQ@Liferay, FAQ@OpenPortal). The collaboration actually started a while ago and Liferay 5.0 (Download) already includes Portlet 2.0, WSRP and OpenSSO support. Future technologies will include Mirage CMS, SAW and others...

WebSynergy is closely related to the current and future evolution of GlassFish; to formally recognize that, we will formally add OpenPortal to the larger GlassFish community.

An early version of WebSynergy based on Liferay 5.0, GlassFish v3, and MySQL is Now Available (also see screencast).

Several of the key community members have written about WebSynergy; check out:

• Brian @ Liferay - Liferay and Sun
• James @ OpenPortal - Sun/Liferay Initiative
• Prashant - Inter-Widget communication in cross-platform widgets

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 :-)

Updates to two popular GlassFish-based bundles. The GF v3 Gem now has a a Bug Fix Update (v0.1.1); Pramod also includes plans for v0.1.2. The second is Liferay 4.4.1, also mostly bug fixes.

I enjoy data mining, so I poked around a bit at the download stats. The GF-based Liferay bundles have been increasing, from 5.4% in 4.3.0 to 15.1% in 4.4.1. And, since JBoss Portal 2.6.4 released the exact same day as Liferay 4.4.1, a comparison between the two was easy: 3778 for Liferay and 1053 for JBoss Portal.