JBoss Portal Development Status

We started a few weeks ago big changes in the project codebase with several goals:

1. Decouple the services consumed by the portal and the portal (life cycle, coupling)
   
2. Improve the QA processes
3. Improve the build system

I chosed to do it at this time because it was just after the 2.6 release and we started to reach some limitations due to the ageing of the build system and the cost of maintaining multiple branches.

We also decided to split the development of the project into 2 directions.

We continue the development of 2.6.x releases with additional features. JBoss Portal 2.x reached its maturity with the 2.6 version and we are going to continue to invest efforts in it. The goal is to deliver time boxed versions of 2.6.x with time frames between 2 and 4 months with emphasis on improving the integration footprint of the portal and the usability. We already provided 2.6.1 and 2.6.2, I can tell you that 2.6.3 is on the rails for December 2007

I asked Thomas Heute (who joined the project a few month after it started, in November 2004 as far as I remember) to lead the JBoss Portal 2.6.x effort and he is doing a great job.

We have started the inception phase of the next generation JBoss Portal 3.0. For now we are focusing on delivering the services that will be used by the platform, it naturally started with the modularization of the existing services (portlet container, identity, etc...) and development of new services such as the presentation framework that will be the next portal front end layer.

The status as of today is that we modularized pretty much everything we wanted (except WSRP and Widget) and we have started the presentation framework development. The portlet container is now agnostic of JBoss AS (thanks to the web SPI module) and can be used in Tomcat or JBoss AS (we are looking forward to support other containers, contributions are welcome here). The mavenization process of the build has started and should be finished soon.

For now we cannot commit to a precise delivery date for 3.0 and I would certainly lie if I would give a precise date. We always have been good at reaching our goals (all the portal releases were done on time or with a couple of weeks of delay, 2.0 June 2005, 2.2 December 2005, 2.4 July 2006, 2.6 June 2007) but for now we are focusing on gathering the necessary components for the 3.0 (presentation framework, security, management, etc...). It comes also from the fact that today 2.6.x has became an integration platform of the different services and 3.0 will follow the same path.

We agreed with our product manager that there will be a JBoss Portal 2.8 release in Q4 2008 that will contain the same feature as 2.6 + the new presentation framework and the implementation of Portlet 2.0 specification (it does not mean that the Portlet 2.0 implementation will not be in JBoss Portal 2.6.x of course!!!).

As usual you can follow our development in the portal development forums.