We are proud to announce GateIn Portal 3.5.0.Beta01. Over past few months we have been working really hard on new features and improvements. Let me quickly list few of them

• AS7 integration. After discussing different solutions in the community we have shifted towards new cleaner packaging and improved configuration.
• Infinispan. While there are still few parts of GateIn relying on older JBoss Cache we are currently shifting most of our caching to be based on Infinispan.
• Improved clustering setup. Number of configuration steps needed to configure clustering with GateIn on JBoss AS7 has been significantly reduced.
• SAML2 and SSO support and configuration improvements and simplifications
• WS-Security support. WSRP fully based on Apache CXF stack. A lot of smaller improvements and bug fixes in this area

Ken has recently announced PortletBridge 3.1.0.Beta3 release which we believe will take portlet development in GateIn up to the new level.  Support for all RichFaces components and for most in WSRP case (76 out of 77) - Yay! PortletBridge is also currently deployed as ready to consume AS7 module in GateIn.

We have introduced GateIn Portal QuickStarts that should help to kickstart portlet development. We are providing ready to use package in our downloads section. It is prepared to be easily tried out in GateIn AS7 bundle and consumed in JBDS.

JavaScript integration is now finalized, we reached this stage with a few iterations since GateIn 3.2, improving the JavaScript support step by step in 3.3 and 3.4 and now we are proud to deliver killer features such as parallel loading, dependency management, true isolation, resource versioning.

GateIn relies on the Asynchronous Module Definition specification implemented by the RequireJS loader and we do support various JavaScript packaging like self-executing anonymous functions, RequireJS modules, CommonJS, custom adapters...

Our integration RequiresJS integration provides

• true isolation avoiding conflicts between GateIn scripts and application scripts
• dependency mapping: ability to remap the version of a module dependency
• group loading: declare load groups in gatein-resources.xml for bundling modules in JavaScript resources

We provide a few examples in GateIn samples that demonstrate usage of RequireJS modules, CommonJS modules, jQuery Highlight plugin, Mustache.JS, Text.JS, different jQuery version, etc... Last but not least we will provide in the next beta the integration of the TodoMVC application using Backbone.JS!

Resource serving for JavaScript and stylesheets now contains versioning of the resource in the URL, allowing long cache settings and seamless product upgrade for browsers. We provided it quite soon for JavaScript resources and now it is also available for stylesheets.

Documentation has been extracted from our codebase and migrated into new home We believe it should help us to improve it easier in the long run. At the moment many features mentioned above are still missing documentation coverage - we are actively working on it!

As it was announced previously we dropped support for legacy web containers. Currently we are providing only Tomcat 7 and JBoss Application Server 7 bundles. We hope to include Jetty support back again for 3.5.0.Final

So what is next? Like it is visible in our roadmap we are heading towards 3.5.0.Final by end of November. Currently we are working hard on QA and missing documentation. Please help us by downloading current release and reporting issues in community forums