OpenPortal

There are 4 portal samples available with Portal Server 7.  Here's a quick overview of each sample and pointers to the screencasts available for the samples.  The  Community Sample showcases community and collaboration features that allow ... [More] users to interact with colleagues, customers, business partners and suppliers.  Here's a few screencasts you'll want to checkout: an overview of the Community Sample screencast, Private Communities screencast, and a screencast that demonstrates the usage of CommunitiesThe Enterprise Sample is a business portal based on a fictitious company named Adventure Sports Café and showcases key features of the Sun Java™ System Portal Server.  Checkout the screencast The Developer Sample highlights content that would be helpful to a developer trying to understand the inner workings of the Sun Java™ System Portal Server. Checkout the screencast The fourth sample is the Welcome Sample which is a welcome page that provides a single point of access to the portal samples and pointers to the product documentation and support. [Less]

Portal Server administration task-related commands (CLI) are easy to find now. In the Portal Server Administration Guide, you will find a link for the equivalent command (CLI) below the task (wherever available) that will directly take you to the Command Line Reference.

With the advent of portals such as iGoogle, Netvibes, and MS Live, syndication of gadgets/widgets/portlets has become quite the rage. Even enterprise portals such as Websphere and Weblogic have jumped on the bandwagon and now allow running iGoogle ... [More] gadgets from within their portals. Similarly they also claim to support syndication of their JSR 168 portlets to other portals such as iGoogle.With the Sun Portal Server we are not far behind. You can easily use a Google gadget portlet wrapper to run Google gadgets in your portal. More about it in a future post. I'll focus on syndication in this post.Of course we support WSRP that allows syndication of portlets between two WSRP-compliant portals. But portals such as iGoogle and Netvibes don't comply with standards such as JSR 168 or WSRP. They have their own mechanisms for doing things. But no reason to worry. Sun Portal Server by design provides a REST-like interface (please note the usage of "-like" to avoid any confusion) to access the portal components. This interface can be used to create a quick and dirty script to achieve syndication of portlets from the Sun Portal Server to iGoogle or another portal.Here's a screenshot of the Developer sample of the Sun Portal as it looks in anonymous user mode. Now look at this screenshot of iGoogle with the same portlets running within iGoogle. This was done with a DHTML/Javascript/Ajax combination and is very easy to do. There are however limitations to this approach. The script does not support portlets with multiple page views, and also does not support editing of portlet preferences from iGoogle. There are better ways to achieve syndication and overcome these limitations. I'll cover those in a future post.Because of the above mentioned limitations I'm reluctant to post the script I used on this blog. But if you are interested then leave a comment or ping me at jai dot suri at sun. I'll send you the script and information about how to use it.  [Less]

 Portal Server document collection had a title called Desktop Customization Guide. During Portal Server 7.0 release, the document collection was reorganized and consolidated. Someone recently asked why such a useful guide was dropped. No, the content was not dropped. The new improved version is called Portal Server Developer Sample Guide.

The Portal Pack 1.3 Beta is now available for download. It has a new feature IPC Story Board which provides  tools support for the Eventing (also referred to as Inter-Portlet Communication) feature supported by Sun Java System Portal ... [More] Server/OpenPortal Portlet Container. This version of the Portal Pack is supported on NetBeans 5.5/5.5.1. Check out my blog for a tutorial on how to use this new feature in your NetBeans IDE. [Less]