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Get the NewslettereXo, JBoss Community Merge Portals For Best of Breed Open Source Solution
Two Java-based portal projects are merging code bases in order to create a best of breed result through their combined strengths: eXo Platform SAS (news, site) and Red Hat's JBoss (news, site).
The goal? To merge JBoss Portal, eXo's Portal and eXo's Java Client Repository (JCR) into a single project that strikes the right balance of robustness and usability.
The Pieces
Who brings what to the table? According to Red Hat's Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Middleware Engineering, “The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org's current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features."
Specifically, according to JBoss Portal Project lead Thomas Heute, each partner in this collaboration has specific responsibilities:
- JBoss will provide its expertise on scalability, modularity, enterprise integration and middleware.
- eXo will provide its expertise in application development and user interfaces.
Such a combination allows each team to focus on its core competencies. Given the reputation open source projects get for focusing far too much on the underpinnings and too little on the user experience, this collaboration does have a chance to lift JBoss up to new heights.
And for eXo Platform SAS, the merger offers the opportunity to build a stronger open source portal platform to serve as the underlying technology for their portfolio of content, collaboration and social networking enterprise solutions.
How Will It Happen?
eXo Platform now begins the work of migrating its code base to JBoss.org. There, the JBoss Portal project will integrate the code further. When the merger is complete, the resulting JBoss eXo Portal project will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
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The key underlying question is: will Red Hat start to offer more verticalized solutions soon (Portal, WCM, ECM or even ERP; CRM;...)?
If Red Hat wants to really compete with SUN/Oracle in the next couple of years it should be able to offer a whole open source platform stack and not only the OS + Middleware. And there are currently quite a lot of nice (commercial or not) open source vertical solutions out there (and the one VC-funded are generally heavily looking for some exit scenarios - BTW: Jahia (www.jahia.com), the company I work for, is not VC-funded so we do not have this kind of pressure).
Portal is often a mix of middleware components (e.g: the portlet container itself) and of a semi-finished product (kind of swiss-knife to generate personalized dashboards). But rapidly it will extend on the needs of WCM/ECM on one side and Social Software on the other.
In order to really compete in the Portal Software industry the JBoss Portal project will need now both a serious WCM/Enterprise Wiki (Web Content approach) and some additional Social components/Collaborative Spaces (Ã la Sharepoint/Jive Software).
The Exo company is still independant for the moment. This allows JBoss (and indirectly Red Hat) to keep a vendor-neutral position in regards of other similar alternatives and competitors and stick to the middleware-only kind of offerings.
But for how much time?
Stephane Croisier
A Portal is an Operating System.