Books, Blogs, Articles and Magazines

Below is a list of useful resources relating to Java, J2EE and portlet development:

Portlet Bridges

A growing number of portlet bridges designed to interface with existing web development frameworks have emerged as well as thrid part portlet development models. The Jakarta Portals Bridges project provides support for common web frameworks like Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl and Velocity.

The Struts bridge has been included in GridSphere allowing developers to reuse existing Struts applications, with the following caveats and features

Spring Portlet MVC

The Spring framework offers an MVC development model for web applications including portlet development.
Have a look at the following wiki for more details including a sample application which works under GridSphere! :-)

KOSMOS portlets

Kosmos 0.2.0RC1 open source project monitoring portlet suite developed at JBoss Labs (http://labs.jboss.com), has been released. Its aim is to give you a quick and easy way to set up project dashboard portal pages.
Version highlights are:

  • JIRA monitoring service in two flavours: one implemented with the JIRA SOAP remote API, and one using web crawling techniques
  • CruiseControl monitoring service: downloads the build log directly from the CrusieControl-generated Build Result webpage, no need for logfiles in the local filesystem anymore
  • caching refactored: fully transparent EHcache-based AOP interceptor
  • zoomable charts: each chart image is generated in lo-resolution and hi-resolution versions to avoid confusing and busy charts
  • compatibility: Liferay Portal 3.6.1 and JBoss Portal 2.2 supported
  • i18n: Polish language pack (thanks to Adam)
  • improved documentation (thanks to Neal and his sister-in-law)

 

External Portlet Providers

A few sites offering portlet repositories are now available. Some such as the Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) site have only a few limited portlets that may prove useful. More recently the JBoss PortletSwap site appears to have more useful offerings.

  1. JBoss PortletSwap
  2. Portlet Open Source Trading Site

 

General J2EE website resources