JBoss Opens Java Source Code to Portal SoftwareJBoss Opens Java Source Code to Portal Software

The JBoss Group on Tuesday will add a full production version of its Java-based portal to its open-source software portfolio.

The 1.0 version of the portal, called Nukes, is available on the JBoss Web site for free download, alongside other open-source software from the group, such as the JBoss J2EE application server and the JBoss IDE, a developer toolset based on the Eclipse open-source IDE. The news is coming out of LinuxWorld Expo in New York.

Nukes is the product of a project launched in June to rewrite the Postnukes open-source portal in Java and rebrand it, said JBoss' president and founder, Marc Fleury. The project, led by an engineer in Marseilles, France, Gulien Viet, already released a beta version of Nukes to the www.jboss.org site for contributions from the open-source community.

With Nukes 1.0, the product is now stable and as good as any of the commercial enterprise portals on the market, Fleury said. "It is enterprise-ready," he said.

The portal has Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) support and can scale to support the number of users an enterprise portal might require, Fleury said. Scalability was a problem with the Postnukes product which, because it is written in the programming language PHP, would retrieve information from a database directly, he said. That structure is fine for a moderate number of portal users but does not scale up very well, Fleury said.

Using a J2EE-based portal allows information to be retrieved from databases by middleware such as an application server, which then sends information to the portal, allowing for a faster Web experience to support more users.

"J2EE is better from that standpoint," he said. "It is cleaner. You know your cache structure [so] it scales great. [Nukes] is enterprise ready."

The JBoss Group Web site, www.jboss.com, as well as the JBoss open-source project site, www.jboss.org, have been running on Nukes for the past several months so the group could test how the product would scale before giving the community access to the product, Fleury said.

Other features in Nukes include personalization as well as the ability for portal administrators to add or change information to a Web site while it is live without having a lot of technical development knowledge.

"It's easy to use from a nontechie standpoint," Fleury said. "That's why Postnukes is so popular--people who didn't know the first thing about Web sites could get going [on it]."

The JBoss Group, which provides professional services around the JBoss open-source software and supports various open-source projects, will immediately offer services and support for the deployment of solutions on Nukes, following the same model the group follows with the JBoss Application Server, Fleury said.

Partners that want to deploy solutions on Nukes also can team up with the JBoss Group to support the product through the JBoss Authorized Service Provider Program.