The JBoss Portal team is proud to make available a snapshot release of JBoss Portal 2.6, targeted to developers. We hope, with this early release, to have the community provide feedback on the direction we are taking, with respect to usability and overall design enhancements in JBoss Portal 2.6.

You can find the downloads, here, and the updated documentation, here.

Target: Usability

"Every day is usability day!"
(I'm not exactly sure what that means, but one of our Product Managers keeps running around the office screaming it, on a caffeine-fueled high... so I thought it went well in this part of the blog.)

Anyway.. here's a quick-and-dirty list of the most important changes in this release:

A new theme: We have added a new theme, "Renaissance", as our default theme.

Personal Dashboards: Users can now have their own personal dashboards, able to customize the portal pages to their liking. The dashboard is accessible by a new navigation region in the layout.

Drag-n-Drop Windows: Using the script.aculo.us library, we have added Drag-n-Drop window support for logged-in users in their personal dashboard area.

AJAX + Persistence: Changes in window positions are now persisted for users logged-in, while in their personal dashboard area.

Admin Portal: Administrators now have a dedicated Admin Portal with all the functionality to manage the portal, cms, users, and roles.

Portlet UI reworked: As this release cycle progresses, you'll find the bundled portlets are also being reworked, with respect to their usability.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

The JBoss Portal team is proud to announce the general availability of JBoss Portal 2.4. This release marks important additions, such as full clustered CMS capabilities and WSRP (Web Service for Remote Portlet) support. For a full human-unreabable list of changes/enhancements in this release, please see our JIRA notes. As always, you can fetch the new release (now with a new clustered version as well) from our download page. For some of the highlights in this release, read below...

• Documentation - Our new documentation guides add the following enhancements, aside from all of the guides being re-created:
  • Tutorials for portlet developers
  • Installation scenarios
  • WSRP configuration options
  • QuickStart Guide
  • Global XML descriptor definitions chapter.
• WSRP - Some of the new additions to our new WSRP implementation are as follows:
  • Ability to easily consume portlets from remote producers
  • Seamless integration of WSRP portlets in portal
  • Support for simple registration schemes
  • Simple caching of markup and metadata
  • Support for WSRP Base level (support for service description and markup interfaces)
  • Local portlets can easily be exposed remotely to WSRP consumers
  • Includes a local WSRP producer to easily test WSRP in Portal ('self' portlet provider)
• Migration - A migration application is available as a deployable war that provides an automated walk-through for those of you upgrading from 2.2.x to 2.4.x. This migration application will be a permanent fixture, accompanying every release.
• Scalability - Render-view caching for improved performance, clustered portal state, and clustered CMS.
• TestSuite - In contrast to our "we let the community test our software" competitors, we have added a Testuite that tests most aspects of the portal codebase and is run nightly in our QA Lab.

The roadmap for 2.6, is presently being fine-tuned. At this time, we will mention a few items that are already being worked on, such as full WSRP 1.0 compliance, CMS enhancements, and a revamping of our usability and UI (wiki| forums).

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

In the spirit of open source and transparency in the JBoss Portal project, we have been soliciting input from our community with regards to the next version of JBoss Portal and its planned enhancements to usability and user interface design.

The Portal Team has just posted a brief on what is being proposed as usability and user-interface enhancements for JBoss Portal 2.6. You can look through all the proposed changes, here. Much of the discussion surrounding these additions were open to the community in this thread, and I would ask that any further conversations over the proposed enhancements take place in the same thread.

Here are some highlights of the wiki article, at this stage:

Our new default theme:

Page-level personalization for users:

Intuitive Portlet Controls:

Dynamic user page-layout creation/modification:

We hope to see our community provide further feedback, regarding the ideas proposed in our wiki. After all, most of the designs above came directly from you, our community, and we thank you for continuing to help JBoss Portal evolve.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

'Ceteris Paribus', is a Latin phrase most of us learned while studying Economics, and is normally defined as "all else being equal". Commonly it is used with respect to the law of supply and demand, 'If the price of BEA licensing would decrease - ceteris paribus - more people will buy BEA licensing.' Of course this statement assumes "all else being equal", and does not take in to account: substitute goods (JBoss, anyone?), macro-economic variables, ridiculous comments on TSS by BEA executives, etc. This is how economic theories are normally discussed, as there can be a myriad of variables to affect the demand/supply of any good/service.

So why the quick lesson in fundamental economics? Is it a primer for a blog on Econometrics? Thankfully, no (I'd like to forget those days). It is meant to define how a cause-and-effect relationship *can* *be* isolated from external influences, something that seems to be lacking in the world of benchmarking.

We all should be familiar with benchmarks, by now. They're those cute little chart-and-graph reports that corporations release periodically to show their product towering over their competitors'. Normally, they're about as objective as the tobacco industry, sponsoring studies, showing how cigarettes don't kill. Clearly, whoever is running the test, has the ability to tweak/tune/hack things in such a way to achieve the desired results. From where I sit, they are nothing more than marketing material/fluff/fud/poop pieces.

Every once in a while, a benchmark is released by a third-party, that would seemingly have nothing at stake with any player in the study 'winning'. This week, we have a study by eweek. JBoss Portal did very well in this 'study'...

On Average Transactions Per Second:

On Average Document Download Time:

The problem with this study, however, is that the idea of Ceteris Paribus is not observed. From their platform matrix, I see a mish-mash of stacks - different OSes, different DBs, JVM?. And then the question, 'Which Portal is the most performant'? If the benchmark implementors had a clue on some basic scientific principles, we would see identical stacks compared - one for the Windows side and one for the Linux side.

Ceteris Paribus breaks down in this study, as...

1. Portals tend to sit at the top of the stack, and are influenced by everything that sits under it. (This is why we leverage JBoss JEMS components, so we don't have any 'frankenstein parts' as our underpinnings.) So all underlying components must be identical: OS, DB, Network usage, etc...
2. Bundled portlets are never identical. A MS Exchange Portlet will take much longer to execute via WS than a simple cached HelloWorldJSP Portlet.
3. Who was the genius that thought of making every portal communicate via network (slow) to MySQLDB, except just one of them accessing an in-memory DB?

I'm not complaining about the results, although - Ceteris Paribus - JBoss Portal would be the clear winner. ;-) However, if benchmarks are a necessary evil we have to deal with in our industry for people to be able to sell ads and steer prospects in their direction, can we agree to observe some basic (very basic) scientific priniciples?

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

From time-to-time we are asked in our JBoss Portal User Forums whether anyone is using JBoss Portal in production. Normally, a few community members raise their hands, and point to their own existing production deployments. Granted, being Open Source (yes we are OS, despite what our FUD-spreading, large, smurf-like competitors would have you believe) and freely available, we have little control over who downloads Portal and deploys it in a production environment.

Innovation Awards:
Its also important to note, at this time, that we will be featuring JBoss Innovation Award sessions. Two submissions related to JBoss Portal are Orbitz/Cendant (link) and ADP (link).

Enter JBoss World:
This year's JBoss World Vegas has no less than 7 portal-related presentations. The topics covered vary; with 4 of them answering important questions mentioned above:

• Who is deploying JBoss Portal
• What problems it helped solve in their enterprise
• Why they chose us over proprietary and expensive technologies
• Cost savings when selecting JBoss Portal over others

Clearly these are just some of our support customers and corporate partners that have real-world use-cases supporting JBoss Portal deployment and selection. List below:

• “Using JEMS to Deliver a US Navy Enterprise Portal” Doug Schnelzer, AEM
• “Using JBoss Portal: Citizen eGovernment Portals” Varun Narula, TCS
• “Leveraging the Power of JBoss Portal with JBoss jBPM” Venkata Challagulla, Cignex
• “La Petite Academy and Amentra: Legacy Modernization Success Story”. Brian Carothers, Amentra, Sherwin Lu & Walt Tracy, La Petite Academy

In addition to the above real-world scenarios, there are 3 planned presentations to be given by the Portal team, listed below:

• “JBoss Portal 2.4: Diablo” Julien Viet & Roy Russo, JBoss, Inc.
• “WSRP and JBoss Portal” Christophe Laprun & Julien Viet, JBoss, Inc.
• “Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286)" Julien Viet, JBoss Inc. This presentation will cover some of the important highlights in the next version of the Portlet Specification.

So if you are interested in meeting some of the folks that have deployed JBoss Portal, want to know more about what is planned by the Portal team, and have an itch to take me on at a friendly poker game, I would suggest attending JBoss World Vegas. It should be a fun and informative time to be had by all who attend!

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

... a parody. ;-)

I just come back from a shopping trip out with co-founder of Hibernate, Gavin King. Gavin decided to move to Atlanta about 3 years ago and has been living here ever since. He works his ass off as most of the company knows, but Gavin also shops every day if he wants to and there is "watah". See, Gavin LOVES to shop and he is also very good at it. I love shopping too but I am a bit worse at it. When I asked Gavin if I really needed a “work” excuse to do this, he mentioned that “shopping” was excuse enough for us to get together in the name of the company, and that Marc Fleury will never know about it.

The mall where he lives (Atlanta, GA) are good fun. There are basically many small stores each with devilish clothing. It was good fun to shop them with Gavin as he basically knows them by heart. Other bonus is the lines were small or empty. He took me the first day to this store called “le internazionale” which basically looks like a toilet bowl full of moguls. It was frankly scary to me, specifically that red velvet jacket that Gavin wanted me to buy without thinking. I managed to put my money down without really thinking about it and Gavin bought this double diamond ring without even breaking style. Wow, I was impressed. He uses this new technique of “phantom purchasing” on credit cards and he masters the move. He was fun to watch.

So I decided to buy myself good sweaters (already splurged on boots earlier this year). BTW, if some of you care about clothing, first thing Gavin taught me is that now is the time to shop and buy the end of season stuff as you probably already know. Store wide was 50% off where Gavin took me. Second I want to mention that my clam-shell Adidas are the SHIZZLE. I wouldn't take them off after the shopping, they were so comfortable.

Anyway, it was good fun shopping with Gavin for 3 days. I am sad that at least *my* season is over.

STAY METAL and good shopping,
Roy Russo

Although a standard on InterPortlet Communication (IPC) is set to be addressed in the next version of the Portlet Specification (JSR-286), as we stand today there is no standardized way of addressing this shortfall in the first version of the Portlet Specification (JSR-168).

Those enterprise portal vendors who have chosen to address IPC, have had to create their own APIs, and JBoss Portal is no exception. With JBoss Portal 2.2, we listened to our community and customers and have included an IPC API that is easy to understand and implement.

The JBoss Portal IPC API, found in 2.2+, makes use of our PortalNode hierarchy. Essentially, all objects and components within the portal are considered branches on a tree.

I invite you all to download the sample, flip through the docs, and let us know what you think in our forums.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo