Harpreet has been driving the creation of a Several New WhitePapers for the Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Topics covered include: Hudson, JBoss, WebSpace Server Cloud and many more. A full list is available from the GF Portfolio Resources page. Also see the Sun.Com Resources page for whitepapers and more across all of Sun's products. All whitepapers are free but registration is required.

Hal Stern's latest Innovating@Sun podcast interview features Peter Reiser discussing Community Equity, a social value system that measures one's online social capital. This system has been successfully used internally for over a year and is now available for general use. The Webspace team has also made an alpha integration available for GlassFish Webspace Server via its Update Center-based developer repository, enabling portal user social capital to be accurately measured (You may also remember the CommunityOne Webcast and presentation).

You can check out the spec, participate at the Kenai project site, or follow the project on Twitter.

Future works in progress include semantic integration with Kiwi, and an implementation of the Activity Streams spec (enabling deeper integration with Facebook, MySpace, StatusNet, and other social platforms).

Several teams at Sun have collaborated to put together a Virtual Machine Template for the GlassFish WebSpace Server. The image is available in a number of formats for VirtualBox (OVF, VDI) and for VMware Workstation (VMDK) and VMware Server ESX (VMDK) and bundles WebSpace, GlassFish, MySQL, and a JeOS prototype of OpenSolaris. With this image the evaluation of WSS is very easy: I already had VBox so I first downloaded the OVF Image; then I imported it and accepted its Configuration Panel, started it, read the end point URL from the VBox Console, pointed my browser there and followed the link in the Image Start Page to the WebSpace Welcome Page. More details at Gabor's Announcement and in the Documentation Page.

As part of the the WebSpace Server 10 release, Ed Ort (from java.sun.com) and I sat down to do a deep dive webcast for GlassFish WebSpace Server. Parts 1 and 2 were originally published a few weeks ago. Now, parts 3 and 4 are now available and cover development tooling, and end user social collaboration techniques. Enjoy!

Portal Development (especially with WebSpace) is made even easier with the recent release of Portal Pack 3.0.1 [download]. Several new features are added, including theme development (including code completion for Velocity), directory deployment/deploy-on-save for rapid testing, Liferay service builder support, and more. for questions and tips, make sure to visit one of many of the community venues, including the mailing lists or #webspace IRC Channel, or contribute on the growing Wiki.

Also, don't miss the Portal Pack and WebSpace teams at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

On the heels of the successful 10.0 release, the WebSpace server team brings you another series of community and milestone builds for the next release, 10.1. The first in this series, WebSpace server 10.1 Community Build 1, is now available. Just like the 10.0 development effort, this series gives you a chance to exercise new features and updates that will be in the 10.1 release, leading up to the final release. You can expect a number of Community and Milestone builds to follow. for questions and tips, make sure to visit us at one of many of the community venues, including the forum or #webspace IRC Channel, or contribute on the growing Wiki (more on this later!).

Also, don't miss us at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

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!

The registration for our CommunityOne Unconferences is now open. We are hosting two intertwined events, one for all the GlassFish projects, the other for OpenSSO, OpenDS et al. Both in Hall A at the Moscone (Wikipedia, GeoHack) the Sunday before JavaOne, May 31st. Both events are free, and you can switch back and forth as your interests apply. Check the GlassFish Unconference page and the OpenSSO Day MeetUp and Topics page.

The unconferences will be followed with a Party at the Thirsty Bear. We have plenty of space at the Moscone but the TB space is limited, so I encourage you to sign up early.

We announced the Sun GlassFish Web Space Server during the Portfolio launch, but I forgot to mention the community site. The site is WebSpace(.dev.java.net) and includes four main entry points: Start, Download, Use and Communicate. The main mailing list is USERS. Enjoy!