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 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

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