J2ee News & Articles

Open source portal provider Liferay (news, site) has announced a partnership with MuleSoft, maker of open source Mule ESB and MuleSoft TCat Server, a value-added distribution of Apache Tomcat. Liferay is now offering a Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) bundle with Tcat Server pre-installed and the all-important end-to-end support from one company. The move positions Liferay as an attractive lightweight, open source, middleware platform alternative to expensive enterprise solutions.

Open source DAM anyone? It has arrived — an open source enterprise-level DAM system named Razuna. Fathered by a Swiss company called SixSigns, Razuna comes to the world with its latest release 1.1.2. Albeit a point release, this version has a lot to offer (to some scenarios).

In the world of Java servlet engines, there are but a few major players. Everybody is familiar with the 800 lb gorillas — BEA’s WebLogic and IBM’s Websphere. Oracle has a commercial product in the Oracle Application Server, while the open source offerings Jakarta Tomcat and RedHat’s JBoss round out the major players in the space.

But hold the show, according to an InformationWeek article, use of the Tomcat engine outpaces that of it’s competition by a rather surprising margin. And according to BZ Research, 64.3% of the respondents participating in a Java survey from December 2006 are using the Tomcat engine, with Websphere in use at 36.9%, JBoss in use at 32%, WebLogic in use at 23.7% and the Oracle Application Server in use at 22.4% of the environments.

Refresh Software has just released an updated version of its proprietary component content management offering.

Woven together by DITA, XML and web publishing experts, SR2 7.1 utilizes an SOA-based J2EE content repository. It installs directly into the IT back-end and sports a simple interface for front-end users.

SR2 also:

• Automates the development of technical documentation
• Makes it easy to author content on a hosted interface, or via Microsoft Word
• Enables XML content publishing across the Web, or on intranets, internet, RSS and portals
• Deploys DITA-based content architecture for topic-related authoring and content repurposing
• Supports any programming language using Web services or SQL, including .NET and Java

The updated offering also supports data migration, hot deploy external triggers, back-end search, and — for the aesthetes — customized WYSIWYG buttons.

OpenCms just released version 7.0.0 of its open source content management solution. Yeah, that last .0 bugged us too.

Major features (per our very to-the-point friend Seth) include WebDAV support, a content relationship engine for dependency management, an undelete feature, and point in time previews.

That last is particularly nifty; it lets you take a glimpse of what the site looked like, or will look like, for a particular date or time. Oh, if only mirrors worked that way.

TERMINALFOUR announces the release of Site Manager 5.3, which builds on Site Manager’s versatile capabilities with the input of customers via user groups and conferences.

Unlike other enterprise CMS solutions like SpikeSource and Oracle ECM, which place great weight on document and records management, TERMINALFOUR Site Manager 5.3 focuses on web-ready image quality and cleaner content.

Asking people directly what they think can confuse them and lead them to make poor choices. Giving them too much choice makes them choose less, and regret the choices they make.

Bowstreet a provider of J2EE tools has announced the latest version of their Portlet Factory (v5.8) and the launch of a JSR 168 validation program, co-sponsored by other industry leaders.

Portlet Factory enables the rapid creation portlets and is now compatible with all portal platforms that support the JSR 168 specification.