Skip navigation
2006

Roy Russo's Blog

October 2006 Previous month Next month

 

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.

 

 

JBoss Portal Home

 

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.

JBoss Portal Home

 

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.

JBoss Portal DnD

 

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.

JBoss Portal Portlets

 

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

 

Along with the Portal team at Sun, we are proud to announce the start of a new protocol for communicating with portlet repositories.

 

The idea for a standard repository protocol came after discussions with Sun over the interoperability of disparate portlet repositories with many portal vendors (as you know, they also have a portlet repository), and how we could offer a standard medium of communication between all players involved. So the idea was to create a Web-Service-based API that would allow any portal vendor to browse repositories, view individual portlet meta-data, and be able to download/update portlets from any repository... much like developers are accustomed to browsing/installing/updating plugins in their favorite IDEs.

 

The standard is not a specification at the JCP. ;-) It is an open standard, so that anyone may take part and voice their opinions in its future development.

 

What this means to portal administrators, is that one day they will be able to install/update/demo portlets from a myriad of repositories from within their portal itself. It also means the portlet world will get a lot smaller, in view, as where those portlets are coming from is transparent to the user.

 

For information on the project, joining the mailing lists, and reading through the early documentation of the standard, go here. Any and all input is appreciated on the mailing lists.

 

STAY METAL
Roy Russo

Filter Blog

By date: