ColdFusion supports JSR 168/ JSR 286 now

Today Adobe annouced ColdFusion 9. I worked on ColdFusion long back and I am sure that it has changed a lot since then. I have not used Coldfusion for a long time now, but what caught my attention today is the support for JSR 168 and JSR 286 portlet standards.

Support for JSR 168/ JSR 286 in Coldfusion means that Coldfusion users can use readily available portlets like SyncEx with Coldfusion. It gives Coldfusion users more pluggable components as well as give portlet vendors like SyncEx a little more market :-)

eXo Portal Merges into JBoss Community

Just now heard that eXo Platform merged portal software development into JBoss Community. I am watching open source portals for a long time and here is my understanding of what it means to everybody -

What it means to eXo
- eXo will be able to expand in USA where it was struggling for a long time

What it means to JBoss
- In absence of any real apps, JBoss Portal was more of a portlet container rather than a full flegged portal. JBoss suited as a middleware platform, but really lacked features (portlets/ apps) required for a portal. By this partnership JBoss will be able to get CMS, Groupware and couple of other applications that will make it competitive in open source portal market.

What it means to eXo-JBoss
- eXo-JBoss will be able to compete Sun-Liferay that was gaining market-share day by day.

What is means to everyone
- Open source portal market will become more competitive and hence we will se better open source portals in future.

I want to congratulate Benjamin, Julien and everybody involve in this partnerhip. Way to go.

Here is the press release for more information -
Partnership announcement press release

Inter Portlet Communication in JSR 286

JSR 168 (Potlet 1.0) specification doesn't clearly suggest any mechanism for the inter-portlet communication i.e. communication between two portlets. This was regarded as one of the major short-comings for JSR 168. Though most of the vendors had their own extensions to JSR 168 for managing inter-portlet communication, use of any of those methods defeat the very purpose of JSR 168. In absence of any well defined sophisticated mechanism, JSR 168 developer had to rely upon either PortalContext or Application Scope of Session for sharing information between the protlets.

JSR 286 has come up with a well defined model to achieve inter-portlet communication. There are two primary ways by which inter-portlet communication can achieved as follows -

1. Public Render Parameters
2. Portlet Events

There are pros and cons of each method. Though the biggest advantage with Portlet Events method is that an object can be passed from one portlet to another as opposed to merely "String" in case of "Public Render Parameters" method.

Both the approaches has been talked about in this blog post with the implementation approach. Please have a look - http://blog.xebia.com/2009/04/19/inter-portlet-coordination-with-jsr-286/

Tutorial: Hello World Portlet on Liferay

Dave has blogged about "building a hello world portlet for Liferay portal" here. Though the article is doesn't seems version specific, still as it is written on 1st April, so it should be for Liferay version 5.2.2.

IDE for JSR 286 Portlet Development

We are starting a new project on JSR 286 and wondering what should be the best IDE for JSR 286 portlet development. The project is on IBM, so IBM RAD (Rapid Application Developer) was the first choice. Though as of now the latest production release 7.0 doesn't support JSR 286 and 7.5 version which supports JSR 286 is just in beta stage. IBM has not communicated any clear date for GA.

I think it leaves us to "Portal Pack 2.0 for NetBeans 6.1", a plugin for NetBeans. I have not tested it yet, but it says the support of JSR 286. I am not sure whether it has embedded JSR 286 container for testing portlet within IDE or not? I'll check and update on this.

By the way, have you started developing JSR 286 portlets? If yes, which IDE do you use?