As we march toward our RC, due out in early May, I thought it would be a good idea to track progress made within the JBoss Portal project. I usually, end up looking at the stats myself, but thought it would be nice to open them up to the community as a whole.

 

Important Dates:

• RC due May 1st.
• Final Release due June 1st.

Team and Tasks:

• We are on-target on our release dates thus far. Novell's side is also on-target with regards to releasing on the set dates placed before them.
• Forums and XWiki work progressing.
• The portal team is minus Thomas Heute. He is assisting in a consulting capacity mostly and helping in the forums for now. His tasks were dispersed by Julien to the remaining members. (me/Julien/Novell). His transition is going smoothly.
• The portal team is plus 2 Novell developers. These guys are sharp, motivated, and dont play around. An extremely healthy addition to the team! We merged cultures, painlessly. Morale +1.
• The Novell team is actively working on the Installer and Theme-API tasks.

Community:

• JBoss Portal homepage ranked 17th most visited on jboss.com/org for March 2005. 17034 Total Visits. w00t!
• Forums were started ~6 months ago. (Alpha was released 4 months ago.)
• Over 1100 posts to date by 120 distinct members.
• Average ~10 posts a day.
• Average one new Poster a day.
• Roughly 75% of posts are installation/configuration issues. (I estimate Novell Installer will mostly eliminate these issues)
• Remainder of posts are members extending or building on top of the framework.
• Independent contributor donated two example portlets: Spring MVC Example Portlet and Sun JSF-RI Example Portlet.
• I will focus this month on sprucing up our homepage - bringing some important items up on the page will help, easier navigation, collateral accessibility, etc..
• Forum stats are impressive. I never bothered to look, just answered posts. Picking up one poster a day, means to me there are XXX others lurking that downloaded and are playing with it. 

 

Our download stats on sourceforge have been broken, since we first posted our Alpha release several months ago. So I uploaded our archives to our own JBoss FTP server last night at 11PM Eastern, and routed all links to this new directory. I just had a look at the stats that run nightly and noticed a healthy number.

1	190	51.63%	761486	51.34%	/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-portal-2.0-beta1-bin.zip
2	36	9.78%	593972	40.05%	/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-portal-2.0-beta1-src.zip
3	118	32.07%	122953	8.29%	/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-forums-2.0-beta1a-bin.zip
4	2	0.54%	4675	0.32%	/jbossportal/2.0b1/jboss-forums-2.0-beta1a-src.zip

 

For one hour worth of downloads, this is a solid number of activity. Next month, I will post the totals for April. I also plan on releasing a JBoss-4.0.1/Portal bundled version in the coming days. This will suffice until we get the installer in place, for those who are having trouble installing the Portal.

 

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo