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

I remember the early days of GlassFish when pretty much the only people writing about GF were Sun folks; I like the situation today where I bump all the time into projects totally unrelated to Sun using GlassFish. Here is one from Japan, the Portal Application Laboratory, where (Palab and Shinsuke) write about How to setup PAL Portal(Jetspeed2) on GFv2. Then there is the whole boatload of people using Hudson (hudson@TA) that have no idea of its association with GlassFish...

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?

Following on from the earlier entry on Prashant's integration of Liferay with OpenSSO on GlassFish, Brian Chan reports that he has picked up Prashant's code and rolled it into Liferay itself: We just integrated the code snippets into Liferay so users can easily integrate with OpenSSO by just going to the Enterprise Admin portlet and entering the right settings. No more code or properties changes. It's great to see new OpenSSO and Glassfish integrations bubbling up from the community. Keep 'em coming!

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 detailed HowTo from Boleslaw: • JBoss Portal with OpenDS and OpenSSO   Thanks to Ludo for the tip.

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

I only have time for a quick blog, but I don't want to wait til tomorrow to point out that yesterday we took advantage of the release of GlassFish v2 beta1 to release several bundles expanding it. More tomorrow, but here are a few good links:

The Sun Web Developer Pack (I shorten it to Sun WDP) includes several Web 2.0 tools including jMaki, Dynamic Faces, Phobos, Rome, WADL, and a REST API. It has been tested with GlassFish and with Tomcat. Check Arun's overview and Dave's comments.

GlassFish v2 beta1 is available in two main bundles, Java EE 5 SDK Update 3 and Java Application Platform SDK Update 3 both available at the Download Page. Check Inder's announcement, and his followup where he explains the differences.

Enjoy!

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.