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

JVantage is a new visual Web Application Development tool that can quickly build a Java EE application from a database description and their latest release (announcement) supports GlassFish and Derby. The JVantage site includes a functionality overview through a flash screencast, a good wiki site, a Roadmap and Forums.