Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 1: Overview

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Sun has a long and successful history in participating in open source—from the early days of BSD UNIX to NFS, OpenOffice, Apache projects such as Tomcat, the NetBeans IDE, OpenSolaris, and to the more recent initiatives to make all of Sun's software portfolio, including the core Java platform, available as open source. Other initiatives that fall specifically in the middleware category are Project GlassFish (application server), Open ESB (SOA and business integration), OpenSSO (identity and security), OpenDS (directory), and a host of other projects. All of them have been a win-win for both Sun and the open-source community at large.

Marching forward with the open-source journey, Sun announced at the JavaOne 2006 conference the move to open-source its Sun Java System Portal Server. Portal Server is a key component of the Sun Java Enterprise System stack.

This article, the first in a series, describes the move's objectives, scope, and efforts. Other parts that detail the individual subprojects will follow. See part 2: Portlet Repository, part 3: Portlet Container, and part 4: Web Services for Remote Portlets.

The history of Sun's Portal Server team spans over eight years of innovation and leadership in the marketplace. The open-source effort for Portal Server will continue that saga by transitioning from closed source to open development in the community, as is occurring for the rest of Sun's software portfolio. The plan is to incrementally move the Portal Server source code, piece by piece, from the repository inside Sun's intranet to outside the firewall onto the java.net infrastructure and, eventually, to move the entire source code to an open development model.

The objectives for the Portal Server open-source initiative are threefold:

• Expose Portal Server's mature and proven enterprise-class capabilities to the community and evolve it there through active participation from the community of developers, users, partners, and like-minded individuals.
  
  
• Build composable, decoupled, and lightweight components that can be used by the developer community and other projects, for example, components that serve as development or test runtimes in tools.
  
  
• Collaborate with other portal, middleware, or similar open-source efforts in the software universe for the benefit of the community.

Ultimately, Sun aims to establish a thriving community that includes anyone interested in both adopting and contributing toward the evolution of a truly enterprise-class and open standards-based portal server.

As a first step toward achieving the objectives and to coincide with the JavaOne 2006 announcement, Sun created the enterprise-class Portal Open Source Project on java.net. Not only does that project now serve as the umbrella for all the Portal Server capabilities, but it is also associated and aligned with the larger umbrella of the middleware stack, including Project GlassFish, OpenSSO, and the other projects that are under development on java.net.

The Portal Open Source Project will include the following capabilities:

• Portlet container that complies with the JSR 168 standard—and, in the future, will comply with the JSR 286 standard
  
  
• Producer and consumer Web services implementations based on the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 1.0 standard—and, in the future, based on the WSRP 2.0 standard
  
  
• Portal aggregation and administration framework
  
  
• Communities and collaboration framework and services
  
  
• Multidevice mobile access to all portal content and applications
  
  
• JavaServer Faces technology-based portlet bridge, an integration library to enable JavaServer Faces applications to run within a portlet environment
  
  
• Portlets for integrating enterprise applications, Web 2.0, collaboration, and other arenas
  
  
• Leverage of full-text search engine with federated search and taxonomy capabilities
  
  
• Leverage of Secure remote access for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and virtual private network (VPN) capabilities

The majority of the above capabilities will be hosted in the Portal Open Source Project, except for some that will be hosted in subprojects. Those include the following:

• Portlet Repository Project
• Portlet Container Project
• WSRP Project
• JSF Portlet Bridge Project

Sun sincerely invites you to visit the project sites and sign up to participate. See the project pages for the procedure and the many ways in which you can contribute. Also, stay tuned for the subsequent parts in this series for more details on the open-source effort as it evolves.

• Java Specification Requests (JSR): Portlet Specifications
  • JSR 168
  • JSR 286
  
  
• OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification
  
  
• Sun Java System Portal Server
  • Main page
  • Developer home
  • Software Forum
  
  
• Weblogs
  • The Portal Post
  • The Aquarium