Red Hat Extends GateIn Portal Project

Red Hat announced Sept. 3 that its GateIn portal project "has been launched in the JBoss Community and is now available for download and developer contribution."

Red Hat announced the news at its co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conferences in Chicago. According to a company news release:

The GateIn project is the next generation of both the JBoss Portal and the eXo Portal projects. This is the first major deliverable based upon the JBoss and eXo collaboration that began earlier in the year. Additionally, the JBoss portal community has been extended beyond the GateIn Project to include a number of strategic partnerships with Alfresco, Jaspersoft and Rivet Logic. Ultimately, the GateIn project is intended to form the foundation for Red Hat's future portal infrastructure products and aims to enable organizations to create rich portal-based application experiences for users.

"The GateIn project represents the advantages of working through the open-source development model; through collaboration we are creating cutting-edge innovation combined with a community of support to ensure that the best technology features make it into the project," Stephen Hess, senior director of product management middleware at Red Hat, said in the release. "After rigorous testing and hardening of the technology we expect to deliver a high-value portal platform with superior performance to our customers."

The statement continued, "The project's goal is to provide a best-of-breed open-source portal platform combining a robust and enterprise-grade Java infrastructure from JBoss with the intuitive, user-friendly interface capabilities of eXo Platform. Key features that are currently being considered for inclusion in GateIn include; granular management of virtual portals, drag-and-drop layouts, contextual menuing and navigational controls, new security and identity administration panels, and full support for open social applications. Ultimately, GateIn is intended to carry a balance between feature-rich capabilities and lightweight flexibility that are the hallmarks of the prior portal projects from JBoss and eXo."

Furthermore, Red Hat said, "The GateIn project is expected to extend the core community of support and partnerships ... [Partners] have committed to certifying technologies such as portlets and extensions to the technology that emerges from the GateIn project. These relationships will present customers with an opportunity to create compelling and flexible portal solutions based upon GateIn and the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform without the cost, complexity and vendor lock-in associated with many portal vendors."

The statement continued:

"These are significant commitments from industry leaders that should help us build a thriving ecosystem around the GateIn portal project," said Hess. "Ultimately, we expect to be able to leverage these partnerships to benefit customers that deploy on the forthcoming JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0."

"GateIn is only the beginning of the collaboration between the JBoss Community and eXo," said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform. "We're committed to the delivery of additional features for GateIn, and to providing tight integration with our entire eXo stack, so that customers can extend their GateIn deployments with advanced document management, enterprise content management, and collaboration capabilities."

Mestrallet said in a news release, "eXo built its applications to plug into its portal technology, which now comprises a significant portion of the GateIn code base. Earlier this year, eXo and Red Hat merged their open-source portal development efforts, with GateIn the first major deliverable to be unveiled. Given this pedigree, eXo's application modules are inherently optimized for GateIn and will be tightly integrated with the road map."

"Red Hat has proven time and again that it knows how to commercialize open source for the enterprise market," Mestrallet said. "With GateIn, the foundation has been laid for another game-changing enterprise solution for a portal infrastructure market underserved by open source."

According to the release:

The eXo stack is an integrated suite of enterprise content management, document management, and collaboration applications that enable people to work smarter and more effectively across business, technical, and operational functions. Built in partnership with eXo customers and partners, the eXo stack is both modular, so customers can use as little or as much of the stack as they need, and integrated, so whatever combination customers choose works out of the box.

To try out eXo applications on the newly released GateIn beta, go to http://exoplatform.com/portal/public/website/.