Thursday, 26 July 2007

JBoss Portal 2.6.1 worth a look

JBoss Portal 2.4.x (and below) was frankly pretty bare-boned and buggy. However, with the 2.6 release things are really changing and with JBoss Portal 2.6.1 these changes are brought to us in full working order (2.6.0 had some troublesome JSF issues with JBAS 4.2). The 2.6.1 release fixes a number of issues reported by yours truly and provides among other things:

  • Generally much improved look and feel
  • Personal Dashboards
  • WSRP administration interface support
  • A refined Portal API
  • A very usable GUI administration
  • Much improved CMS including workflow
  • LDAP Support
  • JSF support

IMO the Portal API is a majorly important feature here. Take something simple like an email view. Maybe this is or is not the ideal portal application but you get the idea. You expect that selecting a folder will affect the list of emails shown. You expect selecting from the list of emails to affect the mail displayed. All of this requires Inter-portlet communication. JSR-168 doesn't answer that. JSR-268 might but you can do it now with the Portal API. There are certainly other gaps to fill but it is certainly beyond a start.

click here to make it bigger, jboss portal admin screenshot
A much improved look and feel

I now watch this project with a great deal more interest and these guys are moving faster than I expected. For 2.8 I hope to see:

  • Support for JBoss Seam
  • Support for: JBoss SSO, Open SSO, and possibly JOSSO (it is of course important that everyone have their own single sign on that hopefully doesn't interoperate with anyone else's)
  • Improved Cluster support
  • Further Portal API improvements
  • More personalization. I'd like to be able to completely define location of portlets and their min/max state like I can on say my.yahoo.com.
  • A more user-level CMS. At present this is still a little stickly.. I don't expect a PHB or his secretary to really use it just yet.

There is of course an ongoing rumor that Red Hat needs to invest more in JBoss especially outside of their acquisitions and JBossAS. However, regardless of any pressures that these guys face, the JBoss Portal guys have really pulled something special off with this release and are well on their way to pulling off something even cooler in the next release. They are to be commended. I hope Red Hat realizes what these guys have done and positions itself to fully capitalize on it commercially.

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Posted by acoliver at 12:11 PM in Open Source
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Mozilla struck by Lightning

We're gearing up for an encore presentation at the Philadelphia area Linux Users' Group next week and the Meldware session at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco, CA which is co-located with Linuxworld. Meanwhile a lot is happening. The first big event takes place outside of Buni.org entirely: Mozilla has released Lightning 0.5. You'll recall that Lightning provides calendar services to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. You can grab the latest WCAP version of the Lightning 0.5 plugin here. You'll hopefully recall that WCAP is the protocol that we use to expose calendar functionality to email clients. So guys, I'm really excited about this release. Not only is it WAY prettier but it fixes some nasty little six-legged features from 0.3 (don't ask what happened to 0.4...there is no 4...why do you ask such questions?). I was so excited I had to immediately patch MCS to work with the latest version (the incompatibilities they introduced where very minor).

For a little demo we create a user via Meldware Communciation Suite's graphical administration tool:

admin screen, click here to make it bigger

Then we can pop into TBird and create a new event:

And we can invite some other folks (I secretly created another user buniluni1@localhost while you weren't looking):

Lightning Freebusy, click here to make it bugger

Who says open source GUIs can't be sexy!!! Okay the info is kind of boring because we're both free all day. Here is what it would look like if we tried to schedule another meeting (after we save this one):

Lightning Freebusy, click here to make it bugger

One of the things I really like is that you cn move the shaded part graphically and it changes the time. Another thing I like is that it dropped the red/green scheme. I dunno who does usability for these guys but umm... Red Green color blindess affects 7-10% of men (virtually no women). Not only that, but I'd tend to bet that the proportions are higher in those that work a lot with computers. Anyhow I thought the lightning 0.3 screen was ugly and, as a result of the color-blindness really, kind of mean (yes I can see it fine). see:

The Weekly view is also more attractive/usable:

Lightning weekly view, click to make it bigger

The montly view is nicer, you can really see the 3d effect of the blue :-)

Lightning day view, click to be struck by it

And the day view:

deuglfied Lightning daily view, click to make it bigger

Okay so I try and be ecumenical to Linux vendors (but love of Ubuntu comes out) and clients...but TBird+Lightning are my favorite and the new TBird 2.0 is much faster with the IMAP. However, Evolution tends to bug me. While its WCAP implementation is more sophisticated and does smarter things with offline views...Evolution is HORRID to develop for because if you get something wrong it crashes. Worse....it hangs. Not only that but sometimes when you kill it....it kills GNOME or at least your task bar. (No KDE-wankers bother me, I've never been sold on KDE from the QT-license fun to now...push your evildoer UI on some other unsuspecting open source villan). Not only that but they just caught the buffer underflow error in their IMAP that we found while developing Meldware...but they only got 1 and haven't found the corresponding overflow! Great example of why we chose the technologies we did for Meldware :-) -- we CAN'T code underflow/overflows :-). Yes, I'm sure Outlook is even worse and Apple's Mail.app has the worst IMAP ever. That rant aside, I've code in HEAD that integrates with Evolution:


weekly


monthly


monthly

While the calendar screens are nice, the setup is akward and the create event is kind of ugly (and the screens are not child windows of the application which is REALLY annoying):

I should have the freebusy support for Evolution fixed in the head shortly, but it is less attractive as well:

Note all the extra events are because Evolution caches them offline (a good thing) and just checks for recently modified/deleted (also good) but offers no easy way to resynch if you like drop the DB during development (pain for me, likely irrelevant to you).

Anyhow, my personal preferences aside, the complete open source groupware stack is a reality today with TBird/Lightning and Meldware (albiet you need to build HEAD if you want to use 0.5 ;-) ) and wait till you see what we're cooking up next!

BTW thanks to Sun for writing the plugins to connect Meldware Calendar to Evolution and Thunderbird. We might have done it without you but boy it would have taken a lot longer!

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Posted by acoliver at 1:10 AM in Meldware
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