Whats New in JBoss Portal 2.2

The JBoss Portal 2.2 release has added many new and exciting features to our already, widely adopted and feature-rich portal framework. In this article we outline what we believe to be the most important additions:

• Ease of Install
• JCR-enable Content Management System
• The Concept of Dynamicity
• A new Theme and Layout API

We've chosen to leave some of the smaller additions like a new Inter-Portlet Communication API, Search-Engine Friendly URLs, and custom URL-Mapping out of this article and only chose to focus on those features that we feel are of interest to the bulk of the development community.

JBoss Portal is a JSR-168-compliant portal framework from JBoss. It can be deployed in a clustered environment with high-availability support, makes use of cacheing to increase performance, and supports most popular frameworks for the portlet devlopers: JSF/MyFaces, Struts, and Spring. The use of Hibernate as a standard across the portal and it's bundled portlets, allows JBoss Portal to be database-vendor agnostic, as well.

It is important to state now, for those unfamiliar with the JBoss Portal product, some of the underlying architecture components that the portal framework utilitizes. JBoss Portal should not be viewed as some monolithic piece of software, but as part of the suite of proven technology components available from JBoss as JEMS.

During the development of JBoss Portal, we stayed away from creating what we refer to as a "Frankenstein Project", and leveraged technologies that were proven in production environments and supported in-house by the lead developers themselves. This philosophy aided us in identifying problems when they popped up, and having the knowledge on-staff to deal with them. Likewise, if our customers ever experience problems with JBoss Portal, the resulting response will most likely be from one of the projects' developers. As a support organization, this allows for intelligent and educated responses to our customers.

Now, on with the show....

Easy installation

One of the most important differentiators of our portal offering is the simple three-step process to get up and running. Unlike some of our competitors, there is no need to tinker around with lengthy xml configuration files, download and hack at large SQL bundles, mess around with the application server's own configuration files, or even hire a short-bus full of overpaid consultants to simply get the portal up and running.

After downloading our binary version of the distribution, extract the archive and the install process is as simple as this:

1. Place the jboss-portal.sar and included datasource descriptor in JBOSS_HOME/default/deploy/.
2. Place your JDBC connector in JBOSS_HOME/default/lib.
3. Create a new database with the information provided in the datasource decriptor.

Now simply start JBoss AS. The portal service, leveraging Hibernate and a sprinkle of magic, will automatically create the appropriate Database tables for you and populate them with the default content. Pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080/portal, will reveal the default JBoss Portal instance.