Hippo Embraces Apache Jetspeed's Revival

The (Open Source) Portal world is changing and evolving rapidly. There is now a clearer segregation of duties between the underlying portal middleware components (e.g., the underlying portlet container) and a finished EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) solution. This trend will continue in the future. Yesterday Exo merged its Portal (and JCR) middleware components with the one of JBoss in order to focus on their value added Vertical Applications relying on top of such components. Liferay is now also better dividing its Liferay Portal from its Liferay Social Office product lines.

Moreover the Portal market is facing new challenges due to increased pressure from web 2.0 and social oriented kind of widgets (e.g., Google OpenSocial Gadgets). JSR168/286 Portlets miserably failed to become a rich marketplace of reusable and portable components. Aggregating dozens of business-oriented portlets on the same page could provide some valuable dashboard. But finally this is not the way end-users are consuming web applications on a daily basis.

So Jahia tries to promote a new paradigm which more heavily combine WCM, DMS and EIP approaches into one single unified end-user experience. Portlets (or more generally a mashup, a digital asset or a piece of HTML content) are only elements you can reuse when composing your web page. So Jahia did not move away of Jetspeed because it was too complicated to use but because Jahia created its own value added unified page aggregation layer on top of all these underlying middleware components.

Coming back to Jetspeed there are lots of discussions out there in order to know if Apache is the best place to host finished products (vs hosting only development libraries or frameworks). Co-optition is sane but more difficult on finished ready-to-use applications. Shouldn't Jetspeed become more a Hippo EIP product offering only? Or should Jetspeed evolve into a more modular EIP framework which would add certain missing extensions to the current Portlet API specification (aka Apache Pluto)? These are today open questions.

Stephane,

Thanks for commenting and sharing your insights about the portals industry, even though not necessarily answering my questions ;)

The OS portal world is evolving rapidly, indeed. JBoss and Exo JCR CEVA stack is one of the developments that interests me the most at the moment.

One thing I have to disagree with you on: the quote about Jahia moving away from "the more complicated Apache JetSpeed..." came from your website. Or, have I misread it?

I know the URL is not very user-friendly and there is no permalink ;) but the quote is under the "Powerful Ajax Portal features" post here:

http://www.jahia.org/cms/home/news/template/newsDetail?queryPath=/content/jahia/org/home/news/news/ContentContainer_89

Thanks again for reading and sharing thoughts!

Best,
Irina

Hi Irina,

Yes, I agree, When it comes to frenchies speaking english the right terms are not always used. You should understand "complicated" as "sophisticated". The Jahia software already has its own template rendering system, permissions mechanism, portlets registry, etc. So some of these components were implemented twice leading to more problems than solutions.

And this was a kind of (indirect) answer to your question: Today EIP (in order to clearly separate them from portal servers mainly used as "frameworks" or middleware components) are extending themselves on the wiki, wcm, widgets and social market niches. Analysts are used to clusterize products in "magic quadrants". Techies are categorizing product according to the underlying standards they refer to. And customers are looking for solutions. And the solution today is often a combination of ECM/WCM/Social/EIP/DAM/XYZ.

Coming back to Apache, Apache Pluto is a Reference Implementation for the JSR168/286 Portlets API standard. And Jetspeed is positioned in-between a middleware portal framework (what does it really mean today?) and a finished ready to use EIP solution.

I personally think the global Apache Portals sub-section (http://portals.apache.org/) will better succeed by trying to focus on developing a state-of-the-art unified portlet/gadget/social development framework rather than on building a finished product.

I recently also wrote a blog entry about it: http://post.ly/pFg
and I think the Apache Portals could become a better place than today in order to help developers best leverage their new Web 2.0 Social oriented and Content enabled web applications. Or JBoss OpenChoice or SpringSource will make it.

Hippo, Jahia or any other commercial proprietary EIP solution could then best reuse (and also perhaps best co-opt) on such a generic project mission statement (helping all our customers getting into a more easy expericence in developing next generation portlets) rather than on trying to develop "yet-another-open-source-JEE-portal-server".

Now I am speaking and not contributing anything excepted words. So I think this is not up to me to decide anything on behalf of Apache. Just some thoughts ;-)

Cheers,
Stephane

I don't understand that Jahia is called an "open source enterprise content management vendor".

They USE open source and have a closed source solution Jahia Sustainable Enterprise License). And even more importantly. They don't contribute back to the community.
Check: http://markmail.org/search/?q=jahia
So can they support their own software?

Brian

Wrong debate.

Jahia 6.0 is fully available under the GPL. No trialware edition. No badgeware (cf: http://www.jahia.org).

The commercial edition (with support, warranties,...) is licensed under a more restricted visible source license. It includes a very fair "quid-pro-quo" paradigm than most of the other "commercial open source" vendors do not integrate into their offering (cf: http://stephanecroisier.jahia.com/is-apache-or-gpl-better-for-open-source-busin).

So Jahia contributed back to the open source several hundreds of thousands of lines of code under the GPL terms and conditions.

So sure we are not as involved as other in collaborative open source driven foundations. But this does not mean that we do not contribute anything back to the FLOSS world. So I think our FLOSS contribution ratio per developer is certainly better than a lot of other proprietary software vendors. So please do not flame the wrong vendors.

Cheers,
Stéphane

Hi Brian,

Similar to other open source software, Jahia proposes a dual licensing model on top on ONE unique source code. Community edition is GPL v2 whereas Enterprise Edition (subscription model) is under JSEL (Jahia Sustainable Enterprise License).

But even under the JSEL, customers that help us to improve the product doesn't pay any license fee even on the Enterprise Edition. And those improvement are also available to the Jahia community and not kept only for paying customers.

You can read an interesting blog post from Matt Asay about our business model:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10251115-16.html?tag=mncol

In the past, we have contributed to Apache Jackrabbit, and are very interested in the Apache Chemistry development and related standards (http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/main/cmisplugfest1.html). We have also had involvement in the Apache Slide project, although that was a long time ago :) ( http://marc.info/?l=slide-dev&m=110442936703201&w=2 )

We have been hard at work on improving the integration of the various open source technologies, but have also built a lot of code on top of them (UI, "glue").

We are building on top of open source, much like a lot of our competitors, and working with the community when possible. We'd like to do more though and will keep on looking for opportunities to do so, but recently we haven't been very active, as the entire team focused on the version 6.

So, yes we know that we haven't had much occasions of contributing to the other open source project but we did and we want to continue to do it with our strengh, energy and motivation (Jahia is NOT VC funded, only backed by its vivid ecosystem of worldwide Partners and Customers).

If you want more info, do not hesitate.

Elie (on behalf of the Jahia's team)

Disclaimer : I'm Jahia's CEO and co-founder.

I would like to comment on what Stephane said: "JSR168/286 Portlets miserably failed to become a rich marketplace of reusable and portable components. "

I wouldn't agree that the standard has failed miserably. We are working with lots of large enterprises who still find value in the server side web component (portlets). The portlet, while not as hooked into the backbone of the web as say Google gadgets, is still a viable solution for Employee and Self Help portals. Its a great way for companies to present their enterprise applications rapidly. Additionally, with standardized products like Hippo 7 and Jahia 6, the integration of content and applications is becoming more and more obtainable enterprise development.

You also mentioned our market will face new challenges due to web 2.0 and social-oriented widgets. I don't think we should shy away from challenges, or be afraid of new technologies. We are in the enterprise software field: which is often a step behind the leading edge. It is a conservative field, and rightly so. We are getting more and more requests from clients for more web 2.0 and collaborative features. We are moving towards supporting the new social standards at Apache Portals. It would be great if we all worked together towards building the foundation for our applications.

You also mentioned that you don't know if Apache is the best place for hosting finished products. I can't help but think of other projects at Apache that are finished such as Apache Web Server and Maven to name only two. My original designs for Jetspeed was to develop a light-weight portal framework. Things don't always go as planned in open source: the community rules. Some contributions to Jetspeed became a bit bloated. I am hoping to change, we'll see. There is still Pluto 2.0, a project that I contribute to often and was very involved in the writing, as an alternative that I see you have embedded for your Portlet support.

Anyway I just wanted to invite you and the Jahia team to participate in Apache Portals an area that interests you.