We are proud to announce GateIn Portal 3.6.0.Beta02 release. This is our last stop before 3.6.0.Final that we plan to ship around end of June. It contains countless number of bug fixes and smaller improvements since Beta01. You can see the full changelog here

We are still polishing things for the final release however several key features can be tried out already. Just to name few of them:

• New administration UI for managing site redirections based on device recognition.
• Demo mobile site with adaptive layout - try accessing GateIn from mobile device or use "mobile" link at the bottom of main page.
• OAuth2 support with Facebook/Google+/Twitter integration for signup and login.
• CDI support in portlets development.
• New Public API
• Several new quickstarts:
  • Social enabled portlets
  • 'Generic' portlet using CDI
  • JSF portlet using CDI
  • Using CDI scopes

• Using Navigation API
• EAP 6.1 integration. It is possible to build and deploy GateIn on EAP binaries available on jboss.org.
• Several UI improvements regarding accessibility (for eg. you can navigate menu with tab).

Binaries are available here. Please try it out and give us feedback!

We are proud to announce GateIn Portal 3.5.0.Final release after three months of development.

A few blog posts already covered the 3.5 features, nevertheless, allow me do a short recap of most exciting aspects of this release.

JBoss Application 7 Integration has been reworked and stabilized. We had good discussion in the community and with AS developers that lead us to an improved layout and configuration.

New eXo JCR 1.15 which is core storage mechanism. You can find full coverage of important features here.

We have updated a lot of core components. WSRP and WS-Security are now fully relying on Apache CXF stack. New PicketLink Federation for SAML. Infinispan powering most of caching layer. And those are just few main examples

Configuration has been improved in lot of places - mainly visible for SSO and clustering

We have finalized the JavaScript modularity introduced since GateIn 3.3 and we now support JavaScript modules based on Asynchronous Module Definition powered by the RequireJS implementation. The JavaScript documentation has been rewritten in two parts: the first covers the modularity in a formal manner and the second is a cookbook providing recipes for modularity such as AMD modules, CommonJS modules, jQuery plugins, multiple versions of jQuery, etc... GateIn comes with a few packaged examples highlighting the cookbook recipes.

Speaking about documentation it has been migrated into new place: the whole team spent a great amount of time to rewrite and improve key parts of it. You can also find a lot of new content in Developers Guide - it will help to bootstrap portlets development and altering of portal configuration.

To help developers even more we have now great set of ready to use examples. Those are part of GateIn Portal QuickStarts which you can download or clone directly from github repository and start developing portlets right away.

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

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!

I finally found some time to publish slides from my presentation during JUDCon London 2011 - "Portal - Lego set for application development". It was a great conference and managed to have quite a few good discussions with people there - thank you all again!. It was very insightful to see that huge interest in portals and hear what people are trying to achieve with our technology. What is also worth to mention is that my portal talk gathered quite a few more people then parallel TorqueBox presentation - sorry Marek, just couldn't hesitate In the end we both had hard time competing with Manik's Infinispan speach.

Here are the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/bdaw/portal-lego

And here is full agenda:

http://www.jboss.org/events/JUDCon/2011/london/agenda.html

Many exciting things have been happening in the project lately and I would like to share some of them with you!

First of all GateIn Portal project blog has been moved to the JBoss.org as we want to focus more on our community space here. All previous posts were imported so old content is secured. Julien already tested new blog with his "Sneak preview of GateIn navigation i18n" and stay tuned for more new content here!

It is a big honor for me to announce that last month I was promoted to GateIn Portal Project Lead on the Red Hat side and I will be co leading this effort with Julien Viet on eXo side. Thomas Heute who held this position before became Technical Development Manager at Red Hat and will focus more on long term strategy for GateIn and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. Please check out his blog about product side of portals at http://jboss-epp.professional-blog.com.

This is a bit special moment for me as I have been involved into GateIn and JBoss Portal since very early days. It was an amazing ride to see how project has evolved under leadership of Julien Viet and Thomas Heute during past few years and I'm really excited about the future! 

Speaking about the future... it has been a while since we released major version of GateIn so we decided it is high time to change that. Therefore we have just tagged and published GateIn 3.2.0 M01. Please visit our downloads page to grab binaries to play with it yourself!

What is new and cool? To just name two here as we are going to share more details about 3.2.0 in a separated blog entry! :

- Support for new containers - Jetty, Tomcat 7 and JBoss Application Server 6!

- Plenty of of bug fixes and minor improvements that accumulated since 3.1.

Check out full list of resolved issues in JIRA. There are 390 related JIRAs!!!

We are looking forward to release more often. There are quite a few big feature and performance improvements that we work on so expect new milestone releases coming soon and 3.2.0 Final closer on the horizon!