JBoss Portal and EPP releases

We are very happy to announce the releases of JBoss Portal 2.6.6 and JBoss Portal 2.7.0.Beta1 !

JBoss Portal 2.6.6 is a maintenance release, it also includes a lot of internationalization work done by Luca Stancapiano (with Italian translation) and partial Russian translation offered by Anton Borisow, thanks ! It's available here for community and will be accessible next week on the Customer Support Portal for our customers.

Now, probably even more exciting is the release of JBoss Portal 2.7.0 Beta 1. It now includes what we call "explicit coordination", we'll have to blog about that feature but there is already a Wiki and samples available out of the box. Also the new documentation is now available.

Now a bit more details about what will happen next:

The following scenario is what should happen:
- JBoss Portal 2.7.0 Candidate for Release 1 at the end of August
- JBoss Portal 2.7.0 General Availability in September

Of course all those dates are not written in stone and depend a lot on issues that we may discover and reported by users. Please try those versions as soon as they are out so we all don't have to wait ten more weeks for bug fixes (see below).

JBoss Portal 2.6.x and JBoss Portal 2.7.x community releases
All minors versions happen on a time-boxed release schedule. Every 10 to 12 weeks roughly, a new minor release comes out containing bug fixes and eventually new features. There is no change here, this is what has been already rolling out for the few past releases.

Community vs Enterprise Portal Platform
By December, we will release an Enterprise Portal Platform based on JBoss Portal 2.7.x and the Enterprise Application Platform 4.3.
What does it mean ? It means that our customers will have access to a JBoss Portal + EAP release with a fixed set of production ready features to guarantee the best stability. This set will be supported for up to five years with certified cumulative patches available. In the meantime, customers are still recommended to use the supported JBoss Portal 2.6 releases from the Customer Support Portal along with a version of the Enterprise Application Platform as the community versions downloaded from jboss.org are not supported. More details are available here. Feel free to contact me (thomas.heute@jboss.com) if you have any question about the supported products.

JBoss Portal 2.6 will be supported till September 2009, see here for details. JBoss Portal 2.4 full supports ends next month (August 2008) with an additional year for security errata and mission critical bug fixes only.

I will come back on the Enterprise Portal Platform details as we get closer to the release date.

I hope I answered the questions about our releases time-frames.

Now on a personal note, I'm getting two weeks off and will be glad to see my Normandy again :)

Daiwa Securities America customer reference

It's pretty difficult to get large customers to talk about their usage of JBoss Portal. Luckily, Daiwa Securities America accepted, and I can't be thankful enough.

Here is the full reference.

I picked the best extracts here:

Daiwa Securities America Inc., one of Japan's largest securities brokerages with a focus on sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. Equities and fixed-income instruments, financial futures and investment banking, has migrated from proprietary solutions to JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. As a result, Daiwa has cut application development time in half, dramatically improved application performance and saved over $300,000 in licensing and hardware costs.

With some previous experience with JBoss solutions, Daiwa first downloaded a free version of the JBoss.org Portal project. Recognizing the mission-critical nature of the DSAweb portal, Daiwa quickly purchased a subscription to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to benefit from the stability and reliability of an enterprise-class platform including support, patches and updates.

With JBoss solutions, Daiwa employees are more productive with faster portal application loading time, developer productivity has increased with the ease of development on open source solutions and JBoss support from Red Hat has been fast and reliable.

If you also have success stories to share (publicly or not), please let me know (thomas.heute@jboss.com).

JBoss Portal @ Rotterdam JBug

The Rotterdam JBug is happening June 20th, Thomas and myself will be there to talk about Portlet 2.0 and the upcoming JBoss Portal 2.7 release. We'll give also a quick overview of the future releases.

The Benelux JBoss User Group is organizing an event on Friday June 20th 2008. There will be plenty of presentations:

• JBoss Portal - Julien Viet and Thomas Heute - JBoss
• Hibernate Search - Emmanuel Bernard - JBoss
• Woman in IT - (special guest presentation) Clara Ko and Linda van der Pal - jduchess.org
• JBoss Drools - Kris Verlaenen - JBoss

Here is more information, it's free of course but you need to register.

JBoss Maven repository mess

So if you want to use the JBoss Logger wrapper you need

• for 2.0.2.GA or 2.0.3.GA : use jboss:jboss-logging-spi
• for 2.0.4.GA : use jboss:jboss-common-logging-spi
• for 2.0.5.GA : use org.jboss:jboss-logging-spi

Yes I am bitching about that :-)

I leave the location before 2.0.2.GA as an exercise to the reader.

Let's hope that for versions above 2.0.5.GA, it will remain the same.

JBoss Portal Face To Face Meeting #1

In May (13-15) the JBoss Portal team will be gathered for its first face to face meeting. I need to tell that I am very excited about it!

The team will be gathered for one week in Corsica where I grew up when I was a teenage and where my parent still live.

I managed to find a unique place on the island (note to my manager: that fits in the meeting budget of course) that will offer us an ideal place for our brainstorming sessions. I was in Corsica last week and I visited it and I must admit I was very impressed. The landlady is going to lend us the main room for our meetings and there is obviously WIFI access for the geeks we are.

The meeting occurs at the right moment as we have started to transition from JBoss Portal 2.6 to JBoss Portal 3.0: last year we started the modularization of the project that gave us the great JBoss Portlet Container product and the new Presentation Framework project and we are on the path to bring those new technologies in our main stream product JBoss Portal 2.7 and 2.8. The meeting will be a good occasion for me to share my view with the whole team and also to discuss about various topics such as security, identity and social aspects of portals, the JBoss Portlet Bridge project.

 welcome to Corsica!

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!!!!

JBoss Microcontainer usage in JBoss Portlet Container

I planned to rewrite the life cycle support in our JBoss Portlet Container product a couple of months ago, I have started that task for a couple of days. The main reason is the addition of portlet filters which introduce a life cycle of the different container objects a bit more complex than what it used to be in the past.

 The current code only manages the portlet application and portlet container with a trivial one to many relationships between application and container.

 The rewrite will introduce the portlet filter object having a one to many relationship with the application and also a one to many relationship with a subset of the containers according to what the application developer describes in the portlet descriptor file.

 So far we have not used directly any state machine framework to manage that. The main reason is that we use JBoss MC in the JBoss Portlet Container product and we use the good old JBoss Microkernel in JBoss AS 4.2.

 One could argue that I should write my own stuff to manage that. Indeed even if it is not very hard to do and that a set of good test cases would help to achieve something reliable it would miss one crucial feature which is the interaction with the environment. Indeed we need to be able to make a portlet container or a portlet application able to depend on some service for instance and have that dependency managed by the hosting environment.

 Another motivation for the rewrite is to expose outside of the container a set of managed object that represent the applications, the containers exposing only a subset of the concerns:

• Life cycle management wired to the MC and not directly to the container obviously
• Expose runtime meta data like portlet info

 In the implementation using JBoss MC, I have been able to simplify a couple of stuff thanks to an interesting feature called deployment callback. It allows to install/uninstall (a special kind of injection but with no managed dependency) all the beans (that's how JBoss MC names its POJO citizens) having a certain class. So this feature allowed me to remove a bunch of wiring code and simplify my stuff.

 The documentation is very good although it is missing some parts, but it's ok as I don't need those part (yet... Mark and Ales if you read me :-) ).

 The integration of our build with Maven improves also a lot about my understanding of JBoss MC, since Idea is able to download sources which helps to understand the kernel API stuff.

 Once I am done with that, I should work on getting the CC/PP portlet feature implemented and than I'll try to upgrade the JBoss MC version to the one matching JBoss AS 5 Beta 4. I'll try to keep you informed about that.

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!

See you at JBoss World

A few of us will represent the JBoss Portal team at the upcoming JBoss World next week. Thomas and I will be on stage to talk about portal technology and Sohil will talk about his favorite pet named SSO.

I will present and demo the new features of the upcoming Portlet 2.0 specification. I intent to cover the major new features of the spec and will explain how they can be leveraged for building applications with concrete use cases. I will also detail the integration of the spec in our mainstream JBoss Portal 2.x product.

Thomas will present and demo a brand new spin-off project showing integration of in-house technologies. He will also explain the key concepts of JBoss Portal.

As in each JBoss World conference we will unveil surprises for you and be available to talk with you during the whole event. We will probably wear the new T-shirts we designed for JavaPolis last year with the new logos, so it should not be hard to recognize us.

See you there...

JBoss Portal @ JBoss World 2008 - Orlando

First, happy new year ! I hope we will all spend a great 2008.

For a start, we will have three talks about and around JBoss Portal at JBoss World in Orlando on February 13-15th.
If you plan to come you will be able to attend:

• Introduction to JBoss Portal I will explain what is JBoss Portal (and portal frameworks in general), and the challenges solved by this framework
• What's New in Portlet 2.0 Julien will present the successor of the JSR-168 spec and the benefits of this new specification.
• JBoss Portal How-To Guide Last but not least Peter Johnson from Unisys will give a presentation of JBoss Portal. He will explain how to customize JBoss Portal to your specific needs. It sure will be very interested to attend and I definitely plan to listen carefully to that one :)

There are other interesting topics of course, like this case study about EJB3 + JSF + Seam + RichFaces introductions to EJB3, jBPM, Seam... The whole agenda is available here.

Of course if you plan to attend, let us know (thomas.heute@jboss.com) and we can also have informal discussions (along with Julien our beloved project leader) for the benefits of all.

Meet The JBoss Portal Foosball team at JavaPolis

The JBoss Portal Foosball team will be at the Red Hat booth during the JavaPolis conference, come and challenge us !

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.

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.

An implementation of partial portal page refresh

JBoss Portal 2.6 has partial page refresh for portlets feature.

The feature allows a page to be partially refreshed when a portlet link is clicked using ajax technology. The goal is not only to refresh the portlet markup but also ensure that the markup of the entire page is correct. And this of course should be totally transparent to the portlet code, i.e the portlet developer should not use an API other than JSR-168.

There is a lot of challenge when it comes to the implementation of that feature, both on the server side and on the client side. On the client side, it is to my opinion not trivial to come up with a universal solution. I built an implementation based on DOM events which allows to react on portlet clicks. I think also there are several other solutions and I have not investigated them all yet.

I choosed the DOM event based solution since it is the less intrusive because it does not require modifications of the portlet markup. It really helps to provide a solution which offers nice degradation when the client side has javascript disabled. It also works nicely with a portlet that would modify the DOM of their markup at runtime.

However I think there are some limitations that could always trigger a full refresh of the page. For instance the main limitation I see today is the programmatic submit of a form that never create events and therefore will force a full page refresh. It is possible to bypass that limitation in some browsers (Firefox, Safari and IE, I haven't yet tested other browsers).

<form id="my_form" action="/portal/...." method="post">

<select onclick="document.getElementById('my_form').submit()">
...
</select>

There is a workaround for this on browsers that allow to modify the prototype of DOM elements such as Firefox of Safari. It consist in modifying the prototype of the HTMLFormElement and replace the submit() method to perform the partial page refresh at this place.

var oldSubmit = HTMLFormElement.prototype.submit;
var newSubmit = function()
{
// Perform AJAX request and update here
}
HTMLFormElement.prototype.submit = newSubmit;

This technique does not work in IE (of course!!!), however it is possible to achieve the same result using a technique that emulates prototype behavior described below.

//This applies an IE "behavior" to the form elements

<style type="text/css">
form
{
behavior: url(test.htc);
}
</style>

And the IE behavior is

<method name="submit" internalname="_submit" />
<script type="text/javascript">
function _submit()
{
// Perform AJAX request and update here
}
</script>

JBoss Portal talk in San Diego, CA on May 11th

If you attend the Red Hat Summit show this week, I will be there for a talk on JBoss Portal.
I came up with the following title: "Leveraging an Open Source Portal Framework
for the integration of Web Applications", the abstract is almost shorter than the title itself.

Anyway, I will introduce portals solutions in general, what does it do, what are their responsibilities... Then I will spend some time on JBoss Portal 2.6 and the features we provide

I will also be present on the booth during all the week, so if you want to discuss about JBoss Portal, come over ! I will wear a specially designed JBoss Portal T-shirt for the first day ;-)

Again, if you are coming to the Red Hat Summit conference this week, my time slot is on Friday May 11th 1:45pm-2:45pm. Here is the full agenda.

For those of you who will be there, I hope to talk to you !

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