Reviews : Enterprise Portals at Non-Enterprise prices (open-source solutions) :

Apache Jetspeed

Jetspeed Web Site at Apache Jakarta

If you have done any research into J2EE portal application, Jetspeed is sure to turn up. A part of the Apache Jakarta project (Apache's J2EE segment), Jetspeed has been around since 1999 and members of the Jetspeed project are active participants in the JSR-168 portlet API specifications (other participants include IBM, BEA Systems, Borland and Epicentric). All of these factors make Jetspeed one of the better options.

Jetspeed uses XML extensively for display and back-end functionality. This includes simple use of RSS feeds and XML data into portlets and WAP cell phone site delivery. Additionally, Portal Structure Markup Language (PSML) is used to store portal-specific information including styles, personalization information and portlet registries.

The documentation is fairly good overall - improved significantly with a tutorial for the 1.4b3 release. Additionally, FAQ's, sample sites, Javadocs and other information is readily available via the Jetspeed home page.

Beyond basic user storage and preference settings and portlet integration, Jetspeed offers a number of nice features. The administrative interface is intuitive. Content can be syndicated and syndicated content can be accessed as portlets. It will be standardized on the portlet specification, enabling absorption of third-party portlet applications. Currently, numerous types of applications can be integrated as portlets including: RSS, JSP, servlets, external Web page, XSL, Velocity, a database browser and more. Data can be integrated with Avantgo. It is also highly portable between J2EE servers using the JDK 1.2 and Servlet 2.2 specifications.

The only weakness I could find with Jetspeed was that its not very customizable. Customizing Jetspeed requires not only knowledge of J2EE programming concepts, but also the Turbine application framework. This isn't inherently a weakness. Building applications on top of existing frameworks is laudable and is a good development strategy. However, not knowing Turbine will add to the learning curve of understanding how Jetspeed works. Note also, that some templates are written using the Velocity template engine (Turbine has Velocity built in).

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