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Red Hat has announced JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, the new version of the open-source software provider’s portal solution.
Announced at the joint Red Hat Summit/JBoss World 2010 event in Boston on June 24, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is designed to reduce the time and cost associated with creating, deploying and managing dynamic web presences. The availability of JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 marks the next stage in Red Hat’s goal of providing a comprehensive portfolio of middleware products.
Moreover, Red Hat officials say this release gives enterprises a flexible, open source alternative for building, deploying, integrating and managing on-premise and cloud-based applications.
JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 follows the JBoss Open Choice philosophy, which is Red Hat’s strategy to provide middleware that provides a lightweight, flexible architecture to support the greatest variety of programming models, languages and deployment options. JBoss Enterprise Middleware supports the choice of the developer and architect regardless of whether they are designing applications for Java Enterprise Edition, Spring Framework, Seam, Google Web Toolkit, Ruby, Groovy, PHP and a host of other frameworks and programming choices.
“With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat provides the middleware components necessary for organizations to standardize their application architecture with confidence using a flexible approach to accommodate user choice,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager for middleware at Red Hat. “JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 provides users the interaction capabilities necessary to build and deploy rich web-based applications.”
According to its “Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals” report, Gartner analysts said they see open source portal deployments growing. “By 2011, Gartner expects at least 15 percent of new enterprise portal projects in Global 2000 firms to use open-source horizontal portal frameworks,” the report said. Additionally, “Gartner sees a shift in the dynamics of a horizontal portal market driven by the combination of enterprise-grade, open-source alternatives with cloud computing,” the report said.
Red Hat’s new portal release also features the JBoss Portlet Bridge, which is an implementation of the Java Specification Request (JSR) 301 and JSR-329 specifications to support JavaServer Faces (JSF) within a portlet and with added enhancements to support other web frameworks. JSR-301 is the Portlet Bridge Specification for JavaServer Faces and JSR-329 is the JSF Portlet 2.0 Bridge specification. Currently the bridge supports any combination of JSF, Seam, and RichFaces to run inside a portlet.
“JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 in combination with the JBoss Portlet Bridge has allowed the development of the CITYTECH Reseller Portal custom portlets to take advantage of the well known Seam, JSF, and RichFaces frameworks rather than coding against the Portlet API,” said Matt Van Bergen, chief technology officer at CITYTECH Inc. “Because it is based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, our JBoss and JEE expertise has transferred well, particularly in the areas of application deployment and administration, and we are confident that our application will be able to meet future scalability and performance requirements. With the core application in place, we expect to rapidly add additional customer self service functionality with a reduced time to market.”
In addition to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, Red Hat is also announcing the availability of a Technical Preview of the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, a rich web content management and workflow product to address an organization’s web content needs, powered by eXo. Site Publisher is a new, optional add-on component to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 providing an additional set of web content management features. Site Publisher is expected to be a fully supported add-on component released concurrently with future JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform releases.
JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio, a comprehensive family of open-source middleware software products to enable developers and organizations to build, deploy, integrate and manage applications on-premise and within the cloud. These products include the JBoss application platform family, which are flexible application platform products for deploying both lightweight and highly transactional applications. JBoss Enterprise SOA and integration platform products provide the software necessary for integrating disparate business processes, while JBoss Developer Studio and frameworks provide the tools necessary for creating dynamic applications.