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2005

Roy Russo's Blog

June 2005 Previous month Next month

 

... and so it was a long and not-so-winding road, but thanks to all the independent portal contributors, the Novell team members, and the JBoss Portal team, we are proud to announce the release of JBoss Portal 2.0. In case you missed some of the press releases, I scooped up a few from Google alerts and listed them here for you to browse:

 

The press releases are the usual sort you would expect from a business-side PR channel. However, the most important message I can convey with regards to this major release, is that JBoss Portal Is Here. What do I mean by that? Frankly, great things abound with the portal project... JBoss Portal has hit every release date on its roadmap thus far, for the month of May we had over 27,000 downloads, companies are building their technology offerings on the portal, and the amount of community participation we've seen is amazing. Add to that the fact that we implement proven JBoss technologies such as JBoss Cache, Hibernate, JGroups, JBoss AS and back it all up with JBoss, Inc support services and we find ourselves with an extremely solid offering.

 

Even with these great signs and great strides we've taken in a short amount of time, I have to say, the best is yet to come. Portal 2.2 (due in 4Q 2005) will extend the project's abilities by adding in WSRP, a JCR implementation, and a clean interface for the manipulation of dynamic objects.

 

On behalf of the Portal Team, we thank all of you that made this Portal software what it is today. As we continue marching forward on our roadmap, we will continue listening and working with the community and solidifying the portal offering we have today.

 

 

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

 

Sorry for the delay in posting my monthly article on where we are with respect to the Portal project. I was waiting for us to finalize the roadmap for the remainder of 2k5 and we were also a bit busy pushing out the RC2 release, which works with Hibernate3 and has much simpler install and configuration process. Frankly, installation is now a no-brainer and we can thank Julien for making this a reality.

 

I'm going to do things a little backwards this month and focus on the most important piece of news-at-hand first...

 

And the downloads are...
Lets take a break this month from posting every number I can find related to JBoss Portal and just focus on one number: 27487. So what does it mean? You should all know by now how much I value download numbers as a reflection of the overall health and growing adoption of a project. So, 27487 is the amount of downloads JBoss Portal has had for the month of May, compared to 12,000+ for April.

 

So lets put this all in perspective by comparing our numbers to other OS projects (we pretty much lapped them). For example, lets take a quick look at Liferay and see how they're doing in the downloads arena from stats on sf.net. Their 3.2 release has seen 10,000+ downloads per month. Lapped. ;-) 'nuff said.

 

Important Dates:
So now that we have our roadmap spec'd out, all that remains is adding in some more information on some of the line-items and assigning firm dates to each major and the incremental releases leading up to them. You can see the roadmap here.

  • 2.0.1 (Maintenance Release) - August
  • 2.2 (Blade) - November 2k5
  • 2.4 (Diablo) - No ETA.


 

There are some other tasks that are not pegged to the release cycle that we should keep in mind. We have our JBoss Labs Team building out the new JBoss Forge on top of portal. They are busy adding in a lot of cool features like the Xwiki portlet, a downloads portlet, and CMS portlets that integrate with SVN repositories. All of this work will be open sourced, once complete, adding to the JBoss Portal project.

 

Team and Tasks:

  • As mentioned before. Julien added in a bsh script that makes installation an absolute breeze - creating the DB tables for you on any Hibernate-support RDBMS and even creating the initial CMS content for you.
  • We refreshed the wiki a bit. We made sure to only post portlets and themes that are working. You can download them here.
  • The webinar this last month was a great success. We had 100 folks show up and they even stayed through my demo on "how to configure and deploy a custom theme. For those of you that missed it, you can view the recording here. A lot of great questions were asked, so thanks for the great participation!
  • As far as the roadmap items go, I will blog soon and elaborate on who is going to do what. I've been tasked with implementing JCR, and I know a lot of you out there have a lot of questions about Portal + JCR and how it will all fit together. Concerns about the theme API and WSRP will be addressed there as well.


STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

 

The Portlet sample wiki page has been updated recently to show off the flexibility of our theme API and showcase JBoss Portal support for existing web frameworks.

 

I have added two new themes that can be downloaded and deployed easily by following this section of the reference guide. One of the themes is the actual one used in the reference guide example and the other is the one used in our portal webinar demo, you can view recorded here.

 

The sample portlets include SpringMVC, Struts, and MyFaces portlets. I also added a freebie RSSPortlet that displays RSS content and is configurable from its own portlet.xml.

 

Hopefully this will help some of you implement framework-based portlets and custom themes in Portal using these examples.

 

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

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