Open source portal search

I’ve been looking at some open source portals. My client has an existing java application, written in Expresso that has some reasonably complex logic embedded in it. Additionally, it’s massively internationalized, with dynamic international content coming from a database, and static content coming from a set of resource bundles. There’s an existing process around updating both of these sets of data. And when we’re talking internationalization, we’re talking Asian character sets as well as the European character sets.

So, the criteria for the portal were:

1. Support for multi-byte character sets and easy localization.

2. Ability to integrate with Expresso’s authentication and authorization systems.

3. Support for normal portal features–adding/moving/removing portlets, minimize/maximize portlets.

4. Documentation.

I looked at a fair number of portals, including jcorporate’s own ePortal, eXo, Liferay, Jetspeed 1, Jetspeed 2, and Pluto (a last alternative, to be avoided if possible, is to roll our own portal-like application). First, I looked at ePortal, but that’s a dead project, with no releases. Then, I installed pluto, which seemed like it would be a perfect fit to be integrated into Expresso. However, integrating pluto looked complex, and after installing it (fantastic instructions for installing pluto here), I realized that pluto did not have a layout manager that would allow for the addition, rearranging or moving of portlets.

I then battled with Jetspeed 2, which involved installing a subversion client and building from source. This looked to be pretty cool, but the sheer lack of documentation, and the fact that there have been no releases, caused me to shy off. This is no failure of Jetspeed 2–this is what projects in development are like; I think it will be a fine project when done but my client just doesn’t need to be on the bleeding edge. I also took a quick look at Liferay, which seems to be a much more full featured portal application than we needed. After reading this blog on portals I decided to take a closer look at eXo. However, the documentation wasn’t fantastic, and it wasn’t readily apparent how to plug in authentication.

I also downloaded and installed Jetspeed 1; if you download the src distribution, you get the helpful tutorial. While Jetspeed 1 is not a standards based solution (I expect most of the portlets will be custom developed anyway), the user community is fairly active, as indicated by the mailing list, and I’ve found the documentation to be extensive. In addition, it meets the localization requirements and the pluggable authentication and authorization systems.

I’m less than thrilled about having to use maven for builds. Others have said it better than I, but it’s just too much for my needs. However, I was able to get an independent directory tree for my project by copying over the maven.xml, project.properties, and project.xml from the tutorial directory to an empty directory. Then I tweaked the project.* files, ran maven jetspeed:genapp, tweaked a few settings in TubineResources.properties to make sure the localization settings were correct, and, voila, I have a working project tree, that, using the Jetspeed maven plugin, is one command away from a deployable war file.