Latest JBoss Portal developments : JBoss Portal 2.0.1 RC1

Thanks our numerous contributors we have been able to release the first release candidate of JBoss Portal 2.0.1 which is the first maintenance release of the 2.0 branch. This release adds new new features and fixes a few bug.

Forums improvements

A lot of work has been made here :

• Navigation improved
• The normal state shows the list of the 5 last posts and is configurable, can be the last populars, etc...
• Poll implementation
• Personalization : signature, notify on reply, number of topics per page, date format, post order, etc...

Hibernate Slide store implementation

The Content Management System of JBoss Portal uses Slide as a back end storage. The Slide service then delegates to something called store the responsability of storing nodes. The default implementation uses a file system and has some drawbacks. The first one is the very poor scalability in a concurrent environment, the second one is that it simply does not work in a clustered environment (don't tell me to use a shared file system), the last one is that it uses the file system itself and not a database.

So I tried to use the JDBC or J2EE store implementation that delegates to a database and here again I am not happy with it. While it solved the scalability problem it raises the portability issues. The store implementations are specific to databases, for instance you have one for MySQL, one for Postgresql, etc... The other issue I have with it is that the way it gets the datasource in a J2EE environment assumes that you are running it from a servlet thread. While it may be true most of the time sometimes the store is called from a service thread.

We solved the previous points by developing our own store implementation based on hibernate which is highly configurable and provide portability accross many databases. Also we did a standalone release that I call JBoss Slide that integrates Slide in JBoss in the best way possible and provide also an implementation of cache invalidation which uses JBoss clustering under the hood featuring things like auto discovery (in the default Slide clustering, you have to hardcode the list of the other cluster nodes in each node) and configurable invalidation transport (JMS or IP multicast).

By the way if someone has access to the Slide Wiki, that would be a good idea to put a link to the JBoss Slide page.

Bug fixes

Every release has its bugfixes, it's boring to list them all so please consult jira for more infos.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is an important release, yet we are working very hard on releasing JBoss Portal 2.2 (scheduled for November 05) which will add more exciting features (I coded over the weekend an implementation for Portlet session replication for instance). To hear more about JBoss Portal 2.2 and how we implement it, I will give a talk at JBoss World Barcelona, October 10-12. I would be pleased to meet anybody to talk about portals.