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

Liferay

Liferay Web Site

Liferay was developed out of the lack of a lower end portal solution. Of all the portals reviewed, Liferay has the best Web site and accompanying documentation. Check out the FAQ). The result is a pretty deep solution that handles not just the basic users and portlet drawing, but also has a full administrative interface, documented support for all of the major databases, documented support for the main J2EE application servers (JBoss/Jetty, JBoss/TomCat, Oracle AS, Pramati, WebLogic, Orion, and more coming soon, see site for versions and latest details) and single sign-on capabilities. Did I mention it also supports multiple languages?

Liferay is a true J2EE application, relying on numerous patterns, EJBs and built on top of the Struts platform. Many J2EE developers are familiar with Struts, making this a good call for an underlying framework. An XML-based registry is also used to store portlets. A number of portlets are included, including a guestbook, a calendar, a mapping utility using Expedia, news, polls, a document library, live stock information and more (including Bible verses). It's a great start for anyone launching a portal project. I was unable to determine what the API is for developing portlets, it looks like EJBs are used for this. In addition to the included portlets, Apache Lucene is used to enable document searching. XML is supported and it looks like Web services.

Liferay is clearly a good option, especially for anyone who is familiar with Struts. Of course because Liferay is a complete application, it will work well for many companies out of the box. The only concern I would have would be how easy or difficult it is to develop portlets.

How to Add Java Applets to Your Site

New on the Java Boutique:

New Review:

Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature set, and it's free!

New Applet:

Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA sequences into three useful formats.

Elsewhere on internet.com:

WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com

WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.

jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.