Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is updating its platform this week with the release of JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, featuring new enhancements designed to improve its ease of use.
At the same time, with its new portal platform, Red Hat is aiming to help grow both the definition and the capabilities of portal technology, it said.[login]
“The idea is that the portal is not an end point — the portal provides a rich set of services that can be leveraged by multiple applications,” Jason Andersen, senior product manager enterprise portal platform at Red Hat, said during a press conference announcing the platform. “The ultimate goal of a portal isn’t to be an application framework anymore, it’s a management framework to manage different types of Web assets. Within Portal Platform 5, we’re able to do that.”
Andersen said that the goal in the new Portal 5 release is to make it easy users to create, manage and build sites. For one thing, the new release improves on previous versions by offering a revised user interface.
Enhancing usability has been a key focus for JBoss in general over the past year with its entire product portfolio.
In Portal 5, there is also now an improved composer function that enables users to drag and drop portlets
Additionally, the release provides an application registration that can store and manage different types of assets, including user profiles, applications and gadgets.
“The application registry allows us to manage portals and gadgets-based assets from one place even if those assets are not hosted in the same place,” Andersen said. “This allows us to extend the idea of what a portal can do.”
In addition to the core Enterprise Portal 5 platform, JBoss is also providing a technical preview of a content management and workflow plugin technology called Site Publisher.
The Site Publisher tool was developed by Red Hat partner eXo, which has had a partnership with JBoss on portal technology since at least June 2009.
Tags: Red Hat, JBoss, Portal
