Apache Portals Applications
Apache Portals Applications (APA) is a collaborative software development project existing under the Apache Portals project. APA is dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available Portlet Applications under the Apache license developed at the Apache Software Foundation.
The following sub-projects are currently housed at Apache Portals:
| Project | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Gems | A collection portlets that are beyond categorization into applications and are completely portable to the Portlet API (1.0 or 2.0) | portlets |
| Demo | A portlet application dedicated to demonstrating different portal technologies like Portals Bridges | application |
| RSS | A portlet application dedicated to RSS-based portlet development | application |
| Database Browser | A portlet application dedicated to the development and database portlet development including scrollable lists and data entry forms | application |
| Web Content 2 | A servlet/portlet application framework dedicated to the development of Reverse Proxying, Web Content rewriting and IFrame based web content. | archive, application, servlets, portlets |
| Web Content | A portlet application dedicated to the development of Web Content rewriting and IFrame based web content. | application |
| Logging | Utilities used to setup and deploy logging for portlet and simple web applications. | archive |
To promote the use of open source portal technology at the application layer: writing open portlet applications. The scope of APA does not include the system layer of portal development, such as portals and containers like Jetspeed, Pluto, or WSRP. We view portlet applications as an important technology in the growing web applications environment. We intend to build freely available portlet application software in order to promote the use of this technology. After several years of Apache Portals providing portal and container software, we are finding that portal technology has reached limited success. We believe the cause to this limited success is the lack of usable, open source portlet applications. Also, many existing portlet applications are limited in their reuse because of their direct ties to a specific portal. The mission of this new project is to address this missing area in the portal community, and fill that need. Our goal is to enliven the portals community from the top down with rich, relevant, free portlet applications, and promote "universal deployment" as much as possible.
We believe housing a open project for the creation of portlet applications is vital to the health of the portals community. By facilitating the creation of new portlet applications by the Apache Portals community. An important goal is to facilitate the creation of new applications.
Whereas full and out-of-the-box universal deployment across all portals might be difficult to realize in practice, APA projects will strive to support universal deployment as much as possible and feasible. Furthermore, dependencies on non-standard portlet or portal features will be limited to those for which ASF compliant specifications are available and which are freely implementable by multiple portals.
A portal is a natural platform for application integration, for bringing together cool Apache open source technology. Apache Portals would like to be the integration center for bringing together different Apache projects and having them work together under a common, secure and customizable solution. Apache Portals will leverage, enable and integrate existing Apache projects and technologies inside these portlet applications.
Any Apache Portals committer can lead the creation of a new APA subproject.
New APA subprojects can be submitted to the portals-general mailing list for vote and acceptance. Only Apache Portals committers can vote. Accelerated creation of small projects is a desired goal of APA. To further facilitate this goal, one specific sub project, named "sandbox" will be predefined which purpose is help start and experiment with potential new applications or components. All Apache Portals committers are allowed to create new sandboxed projects at any time. No application or component from within the sandbox can be released however until they are formally promoted as an official APA subproject under the rules described above. Please refer to the Apache Portals charter for rules regarding removal of a subproject.
Apache Portals is a general project holding sub-projects under the "portlet application" categorization, with no official releases. It is comprised of portlet applications or common and shared components as sub-projects. Each sub-project has its own release cycle. A subproject is defined as one of the following:
Examples of #2 are the "Gems" sub-project for re-usable portlets not tied to any specific portlet application, build support like maven plugins, or backend enabling features like for JCR, web services, databases, etc.
Subprojects will not have their own set of developers. All Portals Applications committers are automatically members of the Apache Portals project: this is intentional to create an team atmosphere across projects to promote cross-pollination of ideas. Votes for adding new committers take place on Apache Portals general list, just like for all other Apache Portals projects.
APA is not a standalone project in that it has no charter, but is dependent on the Apache Portals project for all project management and guidance. APA is not a portal or portlet container. It is made up of portlet applications, as well as standalone reusable portlets found under the Gems subproject. The recommended portal at Apache is Jetspeed. The Portlet API compliant portlet container is Pluto.
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