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!

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.

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!

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!

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 :-)

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.

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.

A couple of recent additions to the Portal Project. First, Dean reports on the availability of the JAAS Portlet a new addition to the Porlet Repository (Home Page, overview article) that uses JAAS to authenticate the user against a plain text password file. Separatedly, Satya reports on the PortalPack project, which is building support for Portlets and Portals on top of NetBeans (see Project Page).

Little by little, the portal project is becoming a useful portal project; Jeff is not an impartial observer but he likes it Better than Pluto.

Part 2 of an article on opensource portal and portlet development is available now on Sun Developer Network. The article's focus is on the new opensource repository for portlets on java.net. As the popularity and resources of opensouce portlets grows, users of portals will gain more and more benefit at a higher and higher ROI of their portal projects. What a great idea for opensource participation. Contributing and sharing portlets which provide simple deploy-and-play functions for portal's and portal pages.