Java Portals get a Jetspeed boost from Apache
Friday, December 30, 2005 09:41 AM
The Apache Portals Jetspeed Team earlier this month officially unveiled Jetspeed 2.0, the next generation of its open source enterprise portal, at ApacheCon US 2005 in San Diego. The Apache Portals Project also introduced Portals Bridges 1.0, supporting portlet development via PHP, Perl and other Web frameworks.
The Jetspeed update, available from the Apache Portals site, introduces a number of significant features, including full support for and certification to the JSR-168 (Java Specification Request) portlet specification. JSR-168 was supported in previous versions of Jetspeed only via the optional Fusion feature, which embeds the Jetspeed 2 portal engine inside Jetspeed 1.6 and later.
Jetspeed 2 introduces a new component architecture designed to be more scalable than the previous incarnation, with multi-threaded functionality. Like Jetspeed 1, the new version is designed to aggregate corporate information and communications, delivering access via standard Web browses as well as WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) phones, pagers and any other access device supported by the servlet engine.
The portal draws on content held in formats such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), RSS (RDF Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication) and database tables, with presentation handled by XSL and delivered via technologies such as JSP (Java Server Pages), Velocity and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). It supports templating and content publication frameworks such as Cocoon and WebMacro.
Among the new features are LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) support for security components such as User Authentication and a number of new administration interfaces. The portal includes CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) components for portlet and page skins and other templates for GUI (Graphical User Interface) designers. A Jetspeed 2 plug-in for the Maven software build tool can be used to build and deploy custom portals.
Areas Jetspeed's developers are still working on include improved caching and clustering support, further AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) integration, new portlets and WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) support.
Portals Bridges 1.0, also introduced on Saturday, supplies portal-independent JSR-168 components supporting existing frameworks such as Struts, JSF (Java Server Faces), PHP, Perl and Velocity, developers said.
The project was initiated by Jetspeed 2 developers, but other portals are now supporting the effort as well, including the Apache Cocoon Portal, JBoss Portal, GridSphere Portal and Stringbeans Portal, according to the Bridges team.
Downloads are available from the Apache Portals site.
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