JBoss Portal vs its competitors

[jimisola]

Hi,

I hope this topic will be accepted here as I believe many potential users are in the same situation as myself - what Portal should I use?

My question is simple: why I should pick JBoss Portal and not one of its competitors such as Liferay, uPortal, Unify etc?

Things we plan to use are:

(important)

Content Management - CMS
User Management
Discussion Forums
Calendar / Event Schedule
Article / News Management
Links / Directory
Download / Document Manager (DMS)
Image / Photo Gallery
Knowledgebase / FAQ
Contacts / Staff Directory
Mail (web-based)

(less important)

Newsletter Management
Messaging and Chat
Business Directory / Listings
Projects / Task Manager
Surveys / Polls


I've focused on JBoss Portal and Liferay and they both have their pros and cons. Liferay's UI seems a bit more intuitive with its drag-n-drop support etc, it does not require a specific Application Server (JBoss Portal does) and it seem to have better Alfresco support.

I found this comparison of the two:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/05/77788_19TCportals_1.html

To what extend is it still valid? There have been released after this was made.

I'm also interested in finding out more about the Alfresco support as it seems to differ between the two ("Liferay came up with Alfresco portlets and JBoss came up with the tie-up with Alfresco", see http://portlets.blogspot.com/2006/05/content-management-portals.html).

I read another blog post on JBoss Portal and Alfresco:

http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2006/05/24/684

and made special notice to

What I was hoping for was that Alfresco would be configured as the replacement JCR repository for JBoss Portal and that there would be a set of useful portlets that exposed the Alfresco repository to portal users. At a bare minimum I would have expected an Alfresco search portlet and a trimmed down ?spaces? portlet.

What is your opinion on this matter (replacement of JCR repository)?

Regards,
Jimisola

[jimisola]

I found the following information about Alfresco and its JSR-168 support:

http://blog.maxdunn.com/articles/2006/04/15/alfresco-architecture:

7. JSR-168 Portal Components

Alfresco supports JSR-168 portals that can be used in JBoss Portal, eXo Portal, any other JSR-168 compatible portal. It includes many different pre-packaged portlets including: browsing, space creation, uploading, versions, properties, collaboration, in-line editing, etc.

and in a very old blog post

Alfresco developed the system using the latest Java technologies, including JBoss Application Server 4.0, JBoss Portal 2.0, Spring 1.2, Hibernate 3.0, MyFaces 1.0, Lucene 1.4 and Java 1.5.

Alfresco obviously has good support JSR-168 (different portlets available).

However, another blog posts says that is uses "JBoss AS and JBoss Portal" which confuses everything.

As I understood it Alfresco can either run stand-alone using e.g. JBoss AS or integrate with JBoss Portal using JSR-168 portlets. Is there more to the integration with JBoss Portal than portlets, e.g. to act as a replacement JCR repository for JBoss Portal?

Regards,
Jimisola

[theute]

JBoss Portal 2.6 has D'n'D

As I understood it Alfresco can either run stand-alone using e.g. JBoss AS or integrate with JBoss Portal using JSR-168 portlets. Is there more to the integration with JBoss Portal than portlets, e.g. to act as a replacement JCR repository for JBoss Portal?

Yes you got it right, you can either run it standalone (the common way) on JBoss AS *or* use the provided portlets to use in any JSR-168 portal; JBoss Portal, liferay...

[jimisola]

Thomas,

JBoss Portal 2.6 has D'n'D

I've seen that, but it is not yet released... If I may ask, when is 2.6 expected? Would you care to elaborate on why JBoss is the prefered choice?

Yes you got it right, you can either run it standalone (the common way) on JBoss AS *or* use the provided portlets to use in any JSR-168 portal; JBoss Portal, liferay...

Does users and roles exist in the application server, so that they can be used by e.g. Alfresco and JBoss Portal or does a standalone Alfresco install mean different user management?

How about the JCR repository for JBoss Portal - is it exchangeable?