Important Dates:

• RC due this week!
• Final Release week-of-June 1st.

Team and Tasks:

• Overall, most of the tasks delegated for the RC release have been completed - at least the most important ones.
• The Novell team has brought a Theme/Layout API and installer with this release. The Installer is still being tested. Martin and I will be adding documentation for developers who want to roll in their own themes/layouts to the Portal. Downloadable theme samples will follow.
• Julien is working on incorporating the Struts-Bridge, currently. No pressure, Julien. ;-)
• A comprehensive feature list will be published with this release, detailing all features currently available in the Portal.
• I'm beginning work on a samples module build. I have all of the samples I want incorporated in to the module, but have to come up with a clever build system for them. Initially, this module will contain: MyFaces, Struts, HelloWorld, Sun JSF-RI, and Spring MVS Portlet samples with source. This should help a lot of developers currently asking how to integrate applications built on other frameworks with our portal.

Numbers, in the Raw:

• JBoss Portal homepage ranked 18th most visited on jboss.com/org for April 2005. 20575 Total Visits. Increase of ~3000 page views over last month (17034).
• Seems like some people actually read my blog. 4988 views to the blog for April. Ranked 46 on most trafficked pages on jboss.com/org.
• New bundled version: Our bundled version was released on April 15th. Thats 3476 downloads to date. 231/day.
• Binary and Source releases are averaging 150 and 130 downloads per day respectively.
• Portal javadoc viewed 5763 times in April. Ranked 11th across all JBoss docs on most viewed. Perhaps it may be time to deploy a downladable javadoc archive? Lots of you seem to be coding away on portal, we'll make it easier on you. ;-)
• Averaging 30 unique members posting to forums per month.

Community:

• We want to personally thank two of our community contributors for their hard work on the portal project.
  • Kev "kevs3d" Roast for supplying us with two working portlets that integrate in to the portal: Sun JSF-RI and Spring MVC Portlet.
  • Swarn "sdhaliwal" Dhaliwal for supplying with us with the Struts-Bridge which, when implemented, will allow for existing struts applications to work with the Portal.
• The portal project is looking for one more community contributor to add to our existing team at JBoss, Inc. I will blog about this in a separate entry after this release is complete and the work-dust has settled.

OpEd:
Our bundled archive will soon surpass our binary download in raw number of downloads. This was to be expected, and I'm glad it was suggested to us by a community member. It will be a standard going forward with every release, even though the sar installer will be arriving. Frankly, its a much easier way for users to get up and running. The down side is that there are less posts in the forums regarding portal. The upside is that the posts we're seeing/answering are more technical in nature - users are not having installation and configuration issue thanks to this bundle, and are digging deeper under the hood. All in all it was a great portal-month. We have significant momentum and interest from the community toward the project. To see the list of candidate features we will all be exploring for the next major release, you can go here.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo