Tom Mueller

As a newcomer to blogging, I'm told that it is best to write what you know about. Well for the last 8 years I've been working on the Sun Java System Portal Server product development team, and I am now the technical lead for the project. Over the years, I've seen the Portal Server product evolve from a quick assemblage of whatever we could pull together to a well integrated system that contains a full range of Portal Server functionality.

The Portal Server project at Sun started in 1998 with the acquisition of the start-up company i-Planet, Inc. and software from the SunIT sun.net project. This i-Planet is not to be confused with the name of the Sun/Netscape Alliance (iPlanet) which came later. i-Planet was working on Internet gateway devices that included remote access technology (the Netlet that is now in Portal Server) along with providing an email application called PonyEspresso which later made its way into Portal Server as NetMail. The SunIT sun.net project was a remote access gateway for Sun employees to access the internal Sun network. This software was combined to create the first release which was called WebTop 2.0 (there never was a 1.0 - or maybe the original software was considered 1.0).

Through the years the product has had many names, including RemotePassage, Stonerunner, Sun.Net, Webtop, i-Planet, Sun ONE Portal Server, and most recently Sun Java System Portal Server. After Webtop, Portal Server had two major releases, PS 3 and PS 6, and the third major release, PS 7, was recently released. The PS 3 release introduced the customizable desktop with an improved interface for developing portal content. It introduced the JSPProvider which allows portal content (channels) to be defined using JSPs.

Portal Server 6.0 was introduced in August, 2002. The biggest improvement for PS 6 (there was never a PS 4 or 5), was the display profile and the idea of a container hierarchy. The display profile is an incredible flexible and powerful feature in Portal Server that forms the basis for identity-based content delivery. The container hierarchy provides a programmatic interface for defining the aggregation behavior for the portal. Minor releases of PS 6 provided support for running on multiple web containers, support for standard JSR-168 Portlets, support for WSRP, and support for access from mobile devices.

Portal Server 7.0 was shipped in December, 2005. Portal Server entered the participation age with PS 7 by introducing support for end-user defined communities and communities services such as wiki and file sharing that allow users to collaborate using informal portals. PS 7 also includes a new administration framework based on JMX and a new, easier to use console.

Starting with PS 6.2, Portal Server became part of the larger Java Enterprise System, making it part of an overall enterprise software stack.