JBoss Portal 2.7 Alpha released

We have just released the alpha version of the upcoming of JBoss Portal 2.7 release that brings the Portlet 2.0 features to our mainstream product JBoss Portal.

The JBoss Portlet Container technology is included in this release and provides an out of the box support for the JSR 286 features such as:

• Portlet eventing
  
• Public pararemers
• Resource serving
• Portlet filters

Our admin  tool has been upgraded as well to support JSR 286.

Enjoy the release, you can get the files from the download page as usual!

JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 GA Release

The JBoss Portal team is very proud to announce the release of the JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 product.

The release is a fully compliant implementation of the Portlet 2 (JSR286) specification, which was released yesterday.

JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 comes with a lightweight portal based on JSP tags and comes bundled with a few demonstration portlets. The goal of that lightweight portal is to provide developers with an easy way to showcase and test their portlet applications. It should work well with other JSP taglibs and templating frameworks.

It provides advanced functionalities:

• Administration application which provides an overview of the deployed applications / portlets / filters and management of their life cycle. Failed portlets or filters can be restarted or stopped when needed.
• Event debugger which should prove very userful to understand complex event interactions.
• Event flood detection to prevent events from running wild.
• Management of life cycle dependencies between portlet filters and portlet container: if a portlet filter fails and is stopped then all the portlet containers dependent on that filter will also be stopped (otherwise it would obviously result in an incorrect application).
• Optimized event payload marshalling: when an event with an object payload is fired from application A to application B, the event will be unmarshalled/marshalled between the two applications classloaders (otherwise it would result in a class cast exception) unless the event class is shared at the server level, in which case the event can be safely transported across application borders.
  

The next major release of our mainstream portal product JBoss Portal 2.7 will bundle the JBoss Portlet Container.

You can download the release from our project download page.

JBoss Portal 2.6.5.GA released

The latest minor release of JBoss Portal has just been released.
This is a bug fix release, here is the full release note.
Grab it while it's hot and don't hesitate to report issues in the forums.

Thanks for the feedbacks we got on previous releases !

JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 Candidate Release 2

We have just released the candidate release 2 of the JBoss Portlet Container project.

 Since the candidate release 1 we added an administration portlet that can manage the life cycle of the deployed applications and containers.

We have also added a very useful event debugger that can help developers to understand the event flow distributed among the different portlets during the interactions an event phase.

You can download the release from our project download page.

JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 Candidate Release 1

I just released the first candidate release of our portlet container product with a few additional features since the beta:

• documentation : a product would not be a product without a documentation. The documentation has improved since the beta and now we have a complete section on the portal taglib and much more.
• optimized event payload marshalling : when an event with an object payload is fired from application A to application B, the event will be unmarshalled/marshalled between the 2 applications classloaders (otherwise it would result in a class cast exception) unless the event class is shared at the server level (optimization).
• life cycle dependencies between portlet filter and portlet container : if a portlet filter fails and is stopped then all the portlet container dependent on that filter will also be stopped (otherwise it would result obviously in an incorrect application).
• administration application which provides an overview of the deployed applications / portlets / filters and management of their life cycle. So it is possible to restart a failed filter or portlet, or stop them when necessary.
• event flood detection : in order to prevent event flood situations

The next release candidate release will probably be done once the public final draft of the spec is available on the JCP site and it should be a certified release.

We should add an event debugger that would help portlet developers to get the reporting of the event phase for debugging purpose. What a great addition to the product!

We'll blog soon about the integration roadmap of the portlet container product in our next release of the mainstream branch: JBoss Portal 2.7!!!!

Portlet 2.0 specification is approved

The spec has been approved on Monday, congratulations to the Expert Group led by Stefan Hepper!!!

You can expect the public final draft to follow soon and we'll do a release of our new product JBoss Portlet Container very soon!!!

JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 Beta 1 release!

I gave my talk this morning at JBoss World about the new features of the Portlet 2.0 specification. It was also the occasion to present a new product called "JBoss Portlet Container" and I must tell you that I am very proud of this new product.

First of all, this is our implementation of the Portlet 2.0 standard. As I said in my talk, it's 97% feature implemented but 100% useful feature implemented :-) . The remaining features will follow soon (actually only CC/PP that I did not add because I need to check the licensing issues and also try to provide a lightweight CC/PP impl).

 It is also our first product release that is not dependant on JBoss Application Server. This first release deploys in Tomcat 6 and  JBoss Application Server 4.2 and we are looking forward to support more container in the future (btw if you are interested by adding support of a container, just drop me a line).

 It comes bundled with a lightweight portal based on JSP tags. The goal of that portal is to provide to developers an easy way to demonstrate and test their portlet applications. It should combine well with other JSP taglibs and templating frameworks.

 Finally, I want to personally thank all the persons involved in that effort (Chris, Wesley and Bolek) and need to tell you that this product release would not have been done without their dedication.

JBoss World day 1

Yesterday was the first JBoss World day.

I had the chance to go on stage during the keynote, invited by our CTO Sacha Labourey to make a little (but working) demo of JBoss Portal 2.6.4. My goal was to show to the audience the current JBoss Portal product and to get the following message out:

• JBoss Portal 2.6.4 just released
• JBoss Portlet Container 2.0 Beta, an implementation of the Portlet 2.0 spec (will be released tomorrow, more to come, stay tuned)
• JBoss Portlet Bridge to make the integration of JSF/RF/Seam apps in JBoss Portal

Right now I am sitting at Thomas session about JBoss Portal. 

My talk is tomorrow morning at 9 AM and you don't want to miss it if you are present and want to hear about Portlet 2.0. I hope to see you there!

JBoss Portal 2.6.4 released

The latest 2.6.x is out with few bug fixes and portlet administration improvements such as the ability to define multiple localized names for a portlet instance.

The full release note is available here.

Important notice: For those of you who were using WSRP a small database schema change has been made. It was unfortunately required to fix a bug for some users.
So if you were using WSRP you will need to alter the table JBP_REG_PROP_DESC_USAGES to rename the column "USAGE" to "DESC_USAGE". Sorry about this.

You will find the download link at the usual place, and again, we hope to hear from you in the forums.

JBoss Portal 2.6.3 released

Two months have passed since the last release, this release focuses on several improvements and Netvibes widget support.
You will notice in this new release the following:

- Support for UWA Netvibes widgets
- Better support of localized pages
- Support for localized portlet instances
- Option to add icons to your portlet definitions
- Ability to start a portlet in the window state and portlet mode you want (For example maximized)
- ...

The full release note is available here.

Note that JDK 5 and JBoss 4.2 are now mandatory as announced previously.

You will find the download link at the usual place, and again, we hope to hear from you in the forums.

The demo website has also been updated to 2.6.3.

JBoss Portal 2.6.2 released

Two months have passed since the last release, this release focuses on usability and SSO.
The admin console usability revamp is now finished adding improved usability and cosmetic changes. The identity portlets have been rewritten providing a more flexible configuration, in particular it is possible to customize the user profile editor. It is also possible to replace the default user registration with a business process which allows to integrate with your user provisioning policy.

On an enterprise stand point, we are making sure JBoss Portal integrates with your existing infrastructure by supporting several LDAP servers (Red Hat Directory Server, OpenLDAP, OpenDS, Sun Directory Server (Microsoft Active Directory has also been reported to work)) and several SSO frameworks such as CAS, JOSSO and OpenSSO.

One thing to notice is that JBoss Portal 2.6.2 is the last release that will be available for JDK 1.4. So if you are still using JDK 1.4, please think about migrating before the next release due on December 10th. The major justification is that today JBoss Portal 2.6.x targets mainly JBoss AS 4.2 which requires the Java 5 runtime.

We kept supporting JBoss AS 4.0.5 for as long as we could, but it is holding us back. Consequently, JBoss Portal 2.6.2 is the last release to support JBoss AS 4.0.5 technically (which just reached its maintenance phase). The professionally supported application server is the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 (JBoss EAP 4.2) while the current community supported application server is JBoss AS 4.2.1.GA. If you want to run JBoss Portal 2.6.2 with JBoss AS 4.0.5 please read this.

Finally you will find usual bug fixes here.

You will find the download link at the usual place, and again, we hope to hear from you in the forums.

JBoss Portal 2.6.1.GA released

Product release blog entries are boring. Still, blogs are a good way to communicate thanks to rss aggregators, so here it is. JBoss Portal 2.6.1.GA is hot and ready to use !!!
This release is fixing the known issues observed on 2.6.0.GA (Here is the list).

In few lines here are the major fixes:
- Fixed Oracle issues with the dashboards
- Fixed a couple of Internet Explorer issues (Note to myself, rant about how IE sucks)
- Fixed JSF isolation, JBoss Portal won't interfere with your JSF webapps (MetaBridge errors) (Note to myself, rant about the JSF+Facelets+Portlet a so wanted stack but currently a nightmare)

It is fully backward compatible with JBoss Portal 2.6.0.GA.

Note that if you use the bundle version we now bundle JBoss Portal with JBoss AS 4.2.1.GA and its embedded Sun RI implementation of JSF 1.2. (JBoss Portal 2.6.1.GA still supports JBoss AS 4.0.5.GA so you can also replace former binaries with the new ones)

Thank you all for the feedback, and please keep reporting bugs/issues/... in our forum.

JBoss Portal 2.6 released!!!!!!!!

After 10 months of intense and hard work the team is very pround to release the general availability of the 2.6 version of JBoss Portal.

We want to thank the following for the help, ideas and feedback the gave us:

The Labs Team for many things. First they build such a nice infrastructure on top of JBoss Portal which give us a real show case of the product. Special thank goes to Damon Sicore (former Labs director) that chose to use JBoss Portal for building labs since 2005. The original design for the theme drag and drop was written by Tomek. The UI part of the team gave us the new Renaissance theme and improved the usability of the portal.

A few Red Hat employes: Prabhat for taking care of portal releases, Chris D. and Simon for giving a tremendous help on the documentation.

Last but not least, our community for the feedback, everyone participating in the forums and Wiki in general. Antoine Herzog for his feedback, he also built numerous customization of JBoss Portal.

You can read the list of features on the traditionnal forum announcement made for each release.

Enjoy the release and as Sacha would say: onward!!!!!

JBoss Portal CR3 release

We have just released the candidate release 3 of JBoss Portal 2.6, it can be downloaded from the usual place.

More info in the user forum.

JBoss Portal 2.6 CR2 Release

The portal team is proud to announce the release of the second candidate release of JBoss Portal 2.6 (Ninja) :

- Partial page refresh for portlets: omg they did it
- Google gadget integration: 5000+ gadgets integrated in your pages
- WSRP 1.0 Compliance: our own codebase, not a WSRP4J hack
- Management portlet completely redone: that's the least we could do :-)
- Dashboard for user private space with drag and drop
- flexible LDAP : integrate your directory server
- Easy and flexible content integration: develop your first Content Driven Portlet
- Usability improvements : User / Role / CMS portlets redone
- CMS improvements : security improvements and workflow
- Full implementation of JSR 168 portlet caching

Downloads from the download page as usual http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossportal/download/index.html

Bugs and issues are reported/discussed in JIRA/Forums