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.

It's always nice to see others combining various technologies to come up with new and interesting applications. In this case, Natiku has described how to run Project WebSynergy onto the Amazon EC2 Computing Cloud. It runs the OpenSolaris OS. This could easily be farmed out to web startups who want to get a site up and running quickly for very low cost, while retaining the ability to pay more for more CPUs/bandwidth later.

Very cool, very cheap, and very easy!

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 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