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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.
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Hot on the heels of SB2, WebSynergy continues its cadence of builds with the latest, Project WebSynergy Community Build 5 [download]. This build incorporates additional samples, a bridge between JSR 286 events and the built-in services (e.g. the activities service), WSRP improvements, jBPM workflow integration into SAW, and a first cut of SWA. On the development side, Portal Pack 3.0 has a new download page and updated NetBeans and Eclipse plugins. A few articles have been written recently: Maruthi on Presence (and a screencast), Allan on Q&A on Message Boards, and Mahipal on i18n. Can't wait to see the next Stable Build (3) ! |
A compilation of today's news of interest:
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At MindBucket Paul provides a comparison of the (single-client) performance of Rails vs Merb. Rails is the incumbent in Ruby frameworks; Merb is a very interesting newcomer. Merb is thread-safe, and so will be Rails 2.0, but the comparison does not consider concurrency so that should be a key issue. The comparison includes numbers on GlassFish Server (and stay tuned for more fine-tuning for that case). From the NetBeans team, a Tutorial on Securing WebApps using Role-Based authentication. The tutorial has detailed step-by-step instructions using NetBeans 6.5 and GlassFish Server. Ludo addresses Rapid Deployment of Apps on GlassFish in a thread at the GlassFish Users Forum Also hints at future improvements (teaser!). Shay reports that Compass 2.1 M3 is now available with improved GlassFish support. From Mahipalsinh an explanation of how to Localize WebSynergy, so you can do it for your favorite language. And, on the section of important Industry News, Cisco buys Jabber, which should provide integrated IM in their offerings, and Amazon launches CDN service, a la Akamai, LimeLight and others. One of the nice things of working in this industry, it is never boring! |
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Project WebSynergy Stable Build 2 [download] is now available! This build represents a significant milestone for the team and establishes a lot of the groundwork for the future features. In addition, summer vacations and name searches have delayed us somewhat, but we are very close to getting the external community site established (see my detailed blog post for details). Future features include exposing more Presence features, authorization and identity-based content delivery via OpenSSO integration, expanded CMS features, and IPS/Update Center support (e.g.by making a v3 module). Development tools for WebSynergy are also rapidly evolving to track the latest features in WebSynergy: Portal Pack Milestone 1 for NetBeans 6.5 is now out. The project is shaping up to really be a revolution in Sun portal. Nice work! |
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The OpenPortal WSRP team have integrated their WSRP 2.0 consumer into Liferay Portal. This feature has been highly anticipated since WSRP 1.0 support was pulled earlier this year due to complexities related to JSR 286/Portlet Container support. This feature allows apps hosted on remote sites to be presented through the Liferay portal desktop. In addition, a new WSRP Consumer Administration app has been added. Rajesh shows example of how to use it in his recent blog entry. You can also check out the JIRA tracking issue. |
In the more general portal space, Project WebSynergy
should be launching its external site in concert with its next Stable Build (SB2), due out in the next few days. I have written a detailed description of the intended community structure, and roadmap and will continue to keep you updated on our progress!
We announced
WebSynergy
at JavaOne;
we were expecting to launch the public site with transparent builds shortly after that but
the end of (our fiscal) year and the summer
have slowed us down.
I think we will soon be able to show public progress;
in the meantime we are making internal progress, together with
the
Liferay team and with add-ons.
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As an example of the type of synergy across our projects,
Ajit describes how to
Integrating WebSynergy with OpenSSO on GFv3,
showing how to download and assemble the pieces and how to configure
OpenSSO |
To celebrate the announcement of OpenSSO Express, here is an updated list of Sun products that build directly on GlassFish Server - let me know if I'm missing any.
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Yesterday, Liferay released version 5.1.0 of Liferay Portal [download]. This latest release incorporates a number of new features, including features and bugfixes contributed from Project WebSynergy (e.g. the portlet container). Future releases will continue to incorporate components such as Mirage CMS API into Liferay Journal, WSRP 2.0, SAW, and presence components (all of which are present in the foundation of Project WebSynergy). As of 5.1.0, Liferay is now bundled with GlassFish v2 and GlassFish v3 [Download Now]! It's a lightweight (33% reduction in size), platform-neutral download that demonstrates the power and modularity of GlassFish v3, with a real-world app. Kudos to the Sun and Liferay team! |
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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. |
Project WebSynergy has enjoyed a couple of recent positive developments: First, Adam Bien is a consultant and book author and has blogged about GlassFish in the past. Recently Adam blogged about the prospects of WebSynergy becoming the killer GlassFish Portal Server - I happen to share this outlook. He was right about GlassFish being the Killer AppServer after all!
Second, Sandeep headed up an effort to get some university students engaged with Sun's open source communities and projects - specifically, GlassFish, WebSynergy (and its NetBeans components). It was a big success, and as part of the larger GlassFish Community, students submitted their project as GAP entries. In addition, this project garnered awareness in their respective academic groups. Kudos to the teams!
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!
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Sun announced Project WebSynergy two weeks ago, during JavaOne, and, since then, the team has written a number of Posts@BSC; I'll try to start catching up. A recent post explains how to configure WebSynergy to use MySQL; the detailed instructions are at here, and there is also an associated Screencast. Thanks to Gopal for the tip |
