OpenPortal - A flexible portal framework for Java

Introduction

The internet provides us with easy access to information, and because of the increasing number of information sources we are faced with the challenge of selecting relevant information.

The OpenPortal is a framework, build to personalise sites helping us to select the relevant information. The basic idea is to allow a user to select a number of portlets to be shown on his/her personal page. A portlet can be a normal webpage, maybe of dynamic nature for example the users pop3/smtp mailbox or a news (nntp) reader. The portlet is a Java ServerPage or a Servlet and it is meant to be the entré to the rest of the application behind it.

The portal is constructed using Enterprise JavaBeans, Java ServerPages and Servlets, so the framework is extremely portable between EJB/JSP application server platforms. All source has been released under General Public License and we encurage the community to participate in enhancing the framework. The idea of building portlets, and letting the user pick and choose what is relevant is key to any portal, so why not contribute to a common framework since we all need the common functionality but its the portlets that makes the difference!

The package is being constantly improved thanks to input from users and code contributed by authors in the community.

Download version 1.1

Download the complete package including full source code , class files and documentation in  ZIP format.

Be sure to visit the  OpenPortal group page on SourceForge, which has links to the release manager, the support manager, mailing lists, bug tracking system and latest project news. The release manager allows you to monitor release updates automatically. It will send you an e-mail notification each time a new version is released.

License

The package is distributed under the General Public License which lets you freely distribute the package to customers and modify the source code.

Feedback & mailing lists

Any feedback is apreciated and we encourage you to send ideas, enhancements and bug requests using the  support manager  and  bug tracking system . You can also drop an e-mail to us here if there is anything wrong with the webpages, you have a question etc.

We would especially like to hear from you if you have adopted the OpenPortal framework and found it useful (even if you didn't, you are welcome to send in your comments).

CVS Access

The OpenPortal source code is accessable from OpenPortal page at SourceForge

Todo

1. Introduce password verification
2. Add time based logout
3. Make portal direct the interaction to just one portlet at a time
4. Introduce groups of users and let the pool of portlets, optionally be restricted to certain groups
5. Generate log files
6. Add standard portlets such as e-mail (pop3/smtp), newsreader (nntp), calender and discussion service.
7. Write user and admin manual
8. Write administration webapplication or swing application
9. Migrate to Java2EE ear/war/ejb-jar

Any volunteers?

Acknowledgments