Today eXo Platform, a leading European open source company, announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with JBoss Portal to create an open source portal platform.

The goal of the new project is to forge a strong portal solution by bringing together the technical strengths of the two projects through the open source community.

According to eXo Platform CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, “What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.”

“The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org’s current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features, combined this collaboration project will help drive portal capabilities forward,” said Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat.

What does this new portal product mean for other open source portal platforms like Liferay and Plone? Should they be worried? They may want to keep an eye out as eXo is contributing a new project to the JBoss community, eXo JCR, which is a “robust cluster-ready Java Content Repository that is standards based and a key component for the project”. Could this be seen a threat to other portal platforms which lacks the robust content management features that eXo JCR will bring?

It would be interesting to see how the new JBoss eXo portal platform fares with enterprises in their choice of portal and collaboration software.

“Liferay Enterprise Portal.”  Sure, Liferay packs all the features that make it a strong “Portal.”  In partnership with Sun, Liferay has a large and experienced team behind their portal capabilities including their implementation of the latest JSR-286 portlet specification / industry standard.

The JSR-286, for its part expands the existing portlet specification in meaningful ways:

• Portlet filters
• Portlet Event support
• Public Render Parameters
• Resource serving

With the strength of its support for the portlet specification one might be tempted to think of Liferay as “just another portal.”  That classification would be misguided. 

Liferay is a platform and a framework for developing collaborative and social applications and services.  Portal is just the mechanism for aggregating and distributing these capabilities.

At the heart of Liferay is a service oriented architecture. Liferay ships with a host of out-of-the-box services for creating collaborative applications.  To cite a few (but not all) examples:

• Profile Service
• Search Services
• Group Services
• Calendar Service
• Friend Services
• Activity Services
• Forum Services
• Blog Services
• Rating Services
• Tagging Services

If the out of the box services do not provide the functionality coverage you’re application requires or you need to create your own domain specific or composite services; Liferay provides a capability called Service Builder.  Service builder makes it very easy to create services.  With the modification of a simple XML file and the execution of a code generation script you can quickly create all the basic plumbing for your services.  If you need persistence, all the Hibernate work is created for you.  If your service needs to be remoted through interfaces like SOAP, all that plumbing can be generated for that as well.  The only code you need to write is the code that is custom to your service.  All the machinery is quickly taken care of by Liferay; the framework.

Liferay makes use of Hibernate to handle data persistence.  Service builder does all the work of configuring and coding against Hibernate for you making this somewhat transparent to you.  There is real world value here. You deal directly with your model not low level JDBC code.  You can configure read / write separation (a special thanks to a community contribution for this. – community matters) and your application is immediately enabled for several mainstream / popular relational databases.

In addition to a rich services framework, Liferay also enables application developers with powerful eventing and lifecycle capabilities called Hooks.  Applications can register to receive and act upon portal and portlet start up and shutdown events, user activities, persistence level CRUD (create, read, update, delete) events, CMS activities and many other out of the box events.  It’s also possible for applications to register and fire their own events for consumption by sibling applications.

To support your presentation tier Liferay has developed a host of tag libraries that work in concert with standard tag libraries.  This makes it very easy to create standards based, lightweight presentations on top of your application and services code.  In addition to server side libraries, Liferay is designed to work extremely well with JQuery, a leading JavaScript / AJAX library for rich application UIs.  The Liferay team even hired a JQuery committer in order to drive home the integration and to help emphasize the importance of strong user experience and quality of UI within the platform.

Is Liferay a Portal?  Yes of course it is.  Liferay has a strong implementation of the industry standards and is the most popular open source JSR-286 portal in the space today. However Liferay is much, much more.  If you need to build a collaborative or social application: Liferay takes care of all the boilerplate coding and provides the fundamental capabilities out-of-the-box allowing you to focus your time, attention and money on your business problem. 

Along with millions of Americans, I too watched the election results last night as the gap between Obama and McCain increased and the critical swing states turned blue one by one. While’s it’s apparent that the vast majority of Americans are ready for a change, part of Obama’s election success can be attributed to his modern way of campaigning, utilizing the power of people and technology in a way never done before during during the election process.

Obama’s campaign recruited Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com. Talk about harnessing the power of the internet.

“The internet grew from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools. Obama’s campaign carefully designed its web site to maximize group collaboration, while at the same time giving individual volunteers tasks they could follow on their own schedules.”

This collaboration of Obama supporters resulted in some creative contributions, such as the Obama ‘08 for iPhone, where social networking features allow users to participate in the campaign process with friends.

This next generation campaign strategy was able to reached out to millions of young voters whose voices might not have been heard otherwise. But by incorporating the technologies that are second nature to this generation into the campaign process, young voters throughout the nation found themselves wanting to take part in this historical landmark event. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that it’s these young voters who helped convert traditionally republican states like Virginia to vote democratic for the first time in over 40 years.

“It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source kind of ethos that infused this campaign,” says Benko, a principal of the political consulting firm Capital City Partners, in Washington, D.C. “Clearly, there was a vision to this.”

It’s undeniable that Barack Obama’s campaign took electioneering to a whole new level, one that harnesses the enthusiasm of his supporters. Needless to say, this landmark election will also serve as a turning point in how election campaigns will be approached in the future.

Rivet Logic will be conducting a joint webinar with Alfresco on November 11th on Web 2.0 powered collaboration. Topics of focus will include how we’ve used Alfresco to build content-rich Web 2.0 collaboration platforms, with examples from real life case studies.

Join us to learn about building scalable yet cost effective solutions that leverage the value of content through a robust content repository like Alfresco. Some new Alfresco 3.0 features and highlights will also be covered.

Register here:
http://www.alfresco.com/about/events/2008/11/web2collab11nov08/

We just published a new case study on one of our projects in the public education sector. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) does great work for advancing public education goals at the US Federal and State levels, and open source portals and content management from Liferay and Alfresco help them collaborate, find, and share critical information in support of many of their projects.

Learn more from our new Case Study: CCSSO Increases Project Efficiency Through Open Source Content Management and Collaboration.