GateIn Portal 3.1 is built on the foundation for JBoss’ Enterprise Portal Platform 5. It runs on top of their solid JBoss Application Server and has a number of updates as they enhance the services provided by the base portal and by Exo’s content management platform. It includes:
- Presentation Services with features like site creation wizards, application registration, nav management, and personal pages
- Virtual Sites to support growing needs of companies
- Improved “skins” which don’t require a restart when creating
- Support for portlets and gadgets managed via the app registry
- Improved User Management
- Dynamic navigation. e.g. create nodes and pages, copy them, move them, secure them to roles and groups
- Also includes reusable nav components like breadcrumbs. This is interesting in that it implies a pretty deep integration to the CM system
- Managed personal dashboards. (e.g. support for Google Gadgets). The skin support drag and drop
- Master Page Object model. OK, so I hinted at this. All objects are in the Java Content Repository (JCR). They are doing what I see other vendors do which is to more tightly integrate their content management system. JBoss and Exo seem to have taken this further down the evolutionary path though.
- More out of the box portlets like content list, content nav, search, etc.
- Embedded content editing and publishing. This makes it easier to manage a site. I’d like to see what that means for staged content.
- Support for JSR 286, JSR 301 and 329 (JSF Portlets), and WSRP 2.0. To be fair, they supported JSR 286 much earlier. The JSF standards are new.
- An interesting Portlet Bridge 2.0 model where they support RichFaces, JBoss SEAM, JSF, Spring Portlets, Sturts, and Flash/Flex
- Support for opensocial which allows you to consume remote and local widgets as well as share those widgets elsewhere. It’s reminiscent of WSRP only for widgets.
- Because it’s based on the JBoss app server, all sorts of single sign on and other configuration services are possible.
Overall, I’m impressed with what they’ve done in past year or so. JBoss Portal had fallen off the radar because other portals offered more out of the box functionality and their portal was just a really good baseline framework. It was kind of like the WebLogic Portal of the open source world. With this latest release, they’ve managed to move far beyond that. I’ll be interested to see if they can keep up the pace in 2011.
Update: Thanks for a clarification by Jason Anderson on the relationship between GateIn, the open source community project and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, the product JBoss sells and supports.
Red Hat has been making great strides in their supported products through their open source product development. In many cases, the open source features are the preview to their supported product features. The open source product is not considered a “reduced feature set or n-1,2 or x” product as with some other vendors. It is their leading edge product and they leverage the wealth of knowledge and feedback from the open source community to mature their supported products very quickly. They have learned how to leverage open source and their underlying JBoss products provide very strong platform support for their portal products.