3.2.0 Final released here!

It took us a while to get there but I’m happy to announce that GateIn Portal 3.2.0.Final has been released. I would like to especially thank Julien Viet with whom we are co leading this project, Thomas Heute from whom I took over this role and our great community for all the hard work.

If you are eager to try - ready to use project bundles are published on our project page in downloads section. And here you can find the full change log from JIRA.

We already blogged about new features that came along with Beta and Milestone releases. Let me just highlight again 2 recent features that we are very proud of.

GateIn Management

To just quote from our documentation: “The management component of the portal allows portal resources to be managed over commons interfaces like REST, CLI, and Portlets/Gadgets.” I think the best way to learn more about great opportunities it gives portal administrators is to watch recent awesome screencast from Nick and read his insightful blog entry. It is truly great to notice that our community is already actively using those features.

Improved URLs

URL management has improved since GateIn 3.1 and now GateIn provides better URLs. Now each URL uniquely identifies a page, which means that a URL always show the same page. The URLs are not hardcoded anymore and one can freely change the URL mapping in the controller.xml file:

You can read how to configurate it in the documentation.

Navigation internationalization

Now is easier than before thanks to the inline label provided in the navigation XML files:

Better import configuration

The import of data from configuration has been improved with several flexible strategies for importing data during startup, XML configuration fragment import is configured by a mode (conserve, merge, insert, overwrite).

More server support

Now GateIn has been upgraded to support Jetty which was not previously support and of course Tomcat 7 in addition of Tomcat 6.

Becoming Java EE 6 Portal

We are proud to announce that as part of this release we provide ready to use GateIn JBoss Application Server 7.1 bundle. This has the preview status as currently WSRP is not supported with this environment yet still we are quite excited to provide this integration. We are also actively working to bring GateIn to OpenShift.

Designing the future...

We are proud to announce that we will strenghten our commitment to open source software and our community in the forthcoming months. Our main idea is to release more often with a key feature for each major release, we want to involve more the community in the design of GateIn.

Technical Specifications

From now on every new project feature will need to have associated technical specification developed in the open. It has been this way but was not very open until now, and we have decided to fully open it in the GateIn community wiki. We kick started dedicated space in our wiki to serve this purpose:

https://community.jboss.org/wiki/GateInSpecifications

This is still quite fresh page that we are slowly feeding with new content. However you can already check our early vision around mobile aspects of GateIn Portal, improving Javascript serving and using JQuery, etc... More to be blogged really soon regarding this topic...

We want to use it to communicate and collaborate with our community around technical aspects of new project features. Additionally our new roadmap is shaping in there as we try to prioritize and scope each new feature. Your comments will be really valuable and helpful for us.

Git - here we come...

We aim to migrate GateIn Portal svn trunk into our github space within next month. Other components will follow shortly. More precise plan will be announced soon. Obviously - we’ll have a technical specification created for the task so you can track the progress and comment

On the horizon... 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.0...

We want to introduce shorter release cycle for the project. With new releases happening ideally within 3 months. Instead of going through several alpha, beta, milestone and candidate releases while polishing 10 new features, we would like to have clean focus on just few that we can deliver in desired time frame. You can check and comment how we are trying to shape the plan in the already mentioned GateIn Specifications wiki page.

Seriously - we want to give GateIn Portal 3.3.0.Final in your hands within next 2-3 months!

So what is next?

This is worth another separate blog entry - and in fact you can also expect such soon. However like you probably saw already on our specification page we are really serious about providing complete set of public APIs for most of interactions with portal services - both Java and REST ones, improving web serving with better CSS and Javascript. Another hot topic is certainly mobile but we are not only thinking about those... There are several improvements being prepared around the UI (Accessibility, JQuery) or authentication (SAML). Still we need to save some excitement for more blog entries so stay tuned!