comparitive evaluation of portals - liferay, jboss, apache jetspeed

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Open Source Portals

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Enterprise Portal Services GroupFulcrum Logic, Inc

Portal Evaluation, Comparative analysis and Recommendation

Presented ByFulcrum Logic Inc., 636 Morris Turnpike Short Hills, NJ - 07078

Version 1.0July, 2008


Overview


If you find it difficult to decide and strategize your portal solution for your organization, a new class of open source portal technology products may be the solution you are looking for. This new breed of technology is emerging into the corporate IT world as a viable and cost effective solution to the competition put up by the mainstream portals offered by leading software solution vendors. The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate strength and weakness of leading Open Source Portals and provide comparative analysis and recommendation.

Portal - Overview

The term “Portal” is overloaded with many definitions. “Portal” could mean a public destination like yahoo.com or your new re-launched website, portal software like IBM WebSphere Portal, or simply an intranet website that aggregates important links on common index pages.

Technically, a portal is a network service that brings together contents from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collates this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user. The definition of a portal can be summarized into five aspects which are:

• Single Point of Entry — enterprise portals can provide single sign-on capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.

• Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.

• Federation — the integration of content provided by other portals, typically through the use of WSRP or similar technologies.

• Personalization — the ability of users to customize the look and feel of their environment. Customers who are using portals can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Also refers to the ability to prioritize most appropriate content based on attributes of the user and metadata of the available content.

• Permissioning — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.



For our purposes, an enterprise portal is:

“A framework for integrating information, applications, and processes across organizational boundaries.”

Portlets:

The concept of an online portal has been around for a while but it has evolved and matured over the years. The mid-1990s saw the advent of public portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo! These sites provided a key set of features – most notably news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search – combined with advertising. In the interest of “stickiness,” these public portals tried to provide as much information and services as possible in one place to make the visitor stay longer.

Before long, companies of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies. And thus, began the evolution towards the enterprise portal we know today.

Naturally, software vendors quickly picked up on this need and, beginning in 1999, began releasing “portal software,” basically toolkits for enterprises trying to develop internal and partner portals. Two key trends that characterize this evolution today have emerged from this. The first is that portal is a hot technology that is evolving from supporting knowledge management to the more complex world of providing a single interface to enterprise-wide content including corporate applications. The second is that as portal projects become more complex, care is required when developing the business case and in selecting products.

Portlet is a content component that is pluggable into user interface of a Web portal. A portal page is displayed as a collection of portlet windows and each portlet window displays a portlet. Portlet applications may include news, e-mail, weather forecast, discussion forums, images etc. Most of the portlets are designed based on portlet standards so that they can be plugged in any portal that supports those standards.

Portal Technology Standards

In the world of software development, there are two camps that compete for industry dominance. Microsoft leads the .NET platform and Sun Microsystems leads the Java platform.

Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE)

J2EE is a platform-independent environment developed by Sun Microsystems to enable developers to create web-based applications that are based on java stack of technology thereby capable of working across diverse range of platforms and operating systems. In 2003, vendors of Java-based enterprise portals produced a standard known as JSR-168. It was to specify an API for interoperability between enterprise portals and portlets. The draft for the second iteration of the standard, JSR-286, is currently under public review. Some of the leading vendors that provide commercial implementations of the portlet containers are IBM, Oracle, BEA Systems, Vignette Corporation etc. Furthermore, a number of open source portal software solutions are also available such as Apache JetSpeed 2, JBoss Portal, Liferay Portal etc.

.NET Framework

The .NET framework is Microsoft's application development platform that enables developers to create Windows applications, Web applications and Web services using different programming languages. The prominent Enterprise Portal offerings in .NET stack are Microsoft's SharePoint and SenseNet's SenseNET portal.





Portal Selected for Evaluation

Liferay 5.1.x Apache JetSpeed 2 JBoss 2.6.x

Prior to evaluating the three Portal solutions it is important to give a brief introduction on each of these portal softwares and highlight their relative strengths & weaknesses.

Open Source Portals



Liferay

Liferay is the industry leader for open source solutions for portal and social collaboration softwares. Liferay is an open source product that is supported by its development community. Liferay offers a variety of technical support, custom development, and training services with certain amount of fees. Liferay MIT license allows users to use, modify, or distribute Liferay with no licensing fees (Liferay.com).

Architecture

Liferay Portal can be deployed in many contexts without restricting its usage to any specific operating system, application server, or database. This is because Liferay supports J2EE platform. Liferay Portal is bundled with more than sixty ready-to-use portlets and there are more than twenty community contributed themes available for download.



JBoss Portal

JBoss Portal is an open source portal framework licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It is 100% pure Java-based. It provides environment for hosting and serving applications and information in a portal Web interface.

Architecture

JBoss Portal supports multiple portal instances running within one container. A portal instance can be viewed as a 'bucket', containing portal objects such as, Portal Pages, Themes, Layouts, and Portlet Windows. It also manages the relationship between the user and the portal itself.



Apache Jetspeed-2

Jetspeed is an Open Portal Platform and Enterprise Information Portal, written entirely in open source under the Apache license in Java and XML. All access to the portal is managed through a robust portal security policy. Individual portlets can be aggregated to create a page. Each portlet is an independent application with Jetspeed as the central point enables the information from multiple sources available in an easy to use manner

Architecture

A portal based on Jetspeed can make applications, database information and other data sources available to end-users through a single Web site. Jetspeed provides a security infrastructure so that the information and functions made available to each user can be customized on the user basis or a role basis. The latest production release of Jetspeed-2 was released on March 3, 2007.The future development areas include alignment with the upcoming Java Portlet Standard 2.0, JSR-286 new portlet applications, WSRP support, and further improvement of the design and user experience (Apache Software Foundation).



Comparative Snapshot of Strengths and Weaknesses

Portal Product Strength Weaknesses

Free open source portal framework, Flexiblecustomization and integration options

Liferay is a small company, with limited experience in the enterprise sector and a limited (albeit growing) track record with Global 2000 scope deployments

Liferay is rapidly gaining market acknowledgement and visibility, Successful deploymentsworldwide, Expert expertise community

Liferay offers few prebuilt portlets to connect to commonly used content management systems, content repositories, collaboration tools and business applications

The Sun-Liferay agreement gives Liferay access to Sun's JSR 286 portlet container and WSRPv2 implementation.

Liferay Portal 5.1.x includes some built-in contentmanagement, collaboration and social-networking features; an interface to Facebook; support for portlets built in Ruby and Python; and support for Google Gadgets

Liferay

Supports multiple application servers

Red Hat is a leading commercial, open-source vendor, offering multiple products under open-source licenses ranging from server operating systems to a complete middleware technology stack, including a Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server and portal

Red Hat positions JBoss Portal as a custom development platform, rather than as an out-of-the-box portal solution.

An open-source licensing model reduces perceived investment risks, Flexible customization and integration options

Little more complex portal product than its competitors in the open source arena

Red Hat's support for portal-related standards minimizes risk of vendor lock-in with JBoss Portal

Red Hat's JBoss Portal trails several commercial portal vendors in portal-embedded collaboration functionality

JBoss

Expert expertise community Also lacks the availability of out-of-the-box portlets for commonly used enterprise applications and tools

Apache Jetspeed

Flexible, open-source license backed by Apache

limited documentation, time consuming



Main Evaluation

Criteria

Sub-Criteria LifeRay 5.1.x JBoss 2.6.x Apache Jetspeed 2

Weight Value

Score

Weighted Score

Score

Weighted Score

Score

Weighted Score

Look and Feel Aesthetics (Front-end)

3 3 9 2 6 1 3

Ease of use (Front-end)

3 2 6 2 6 1 3

RIA presentation

2 2 4 2 4 1 2

Security Authentication

3 3 9 2 6 2 6

Authorization 3 2 6 2 6 2 6

Personalization

2 2 4 2 4 2 4

Functional Feature

Search Capability

3 1 3 1 3 1 3

Language 1 3 3 3 3 3 3

Site Analytics 2 1 2 1 2 1 2

Bookmark Feature

3 2 6 1 3 1 3

Mobile (Handheld) device access

2 2 4 2 4 2 4

CMS (Content Management System)

CMS feature 3 3 9 2 6 1 3

Inline Editing of Content

2 3 6 1 2 1 2

Can embed multimedia in content

3 2 6 1 3 1 3

WYSIWYG editor

3 2 6 1 3 1 3

Workflow and Approval feature.

2 2 4 2 4 1 2

Document Sharing

2 2 4 1 2 1 2

Community & Collaboration

Email 2 2 4 1 2 1 2

Evaluation Criteria and Comparative Analysis



Main Evaluation

Criteria

Sub-Criteria LifeRay 5.1.x JBoss 2.6.x Apache Jetspeed 2

Announcements

3 3 9 1 3 1 3

Forums 1 2 2 1 1 1 1

Real timecommunication (integration with lotusSametime. Chat)

2 2 4 1 2 1 2

Wiki 1 3 3 1 1 1 1

Blog 1 3 3 1 1 1 1

Calendar 3 3 9 2 6 2 6

SMS 1 2 2 1 1 1 1

Standards Architecture 2 3 6 2 4 1 2

Database 1 3 3 3 3 3 3

Application Server

1 3 3 2 2 1 1

Operating System

1 3 3 3 3 3 3

LDAP 1 2 2 2 2 1 1

Browser 1 2 2 2 2 2 2

WEB 2.0Support

1 3 3 2 2 1 1

SOA Compliance

1 3 3 2 2 1 1

Support Online help, documentation & training

2 2 4 2 4 2 4

Production Support

2 2 4 2 4 2 4

Cost Licensing & operational Costs

3 3 9 3 9 3 9

Total Weighted Score

169

121

102

Evaluation Criteria and Comparative Analysis



Based on comparative analysis of the three portal solutions using the Portal Evaluation Matrix tool, the table below computes the overall score and ranking for each of them.

Criteria LifeRay Portal 5.1.x

JBoss Portal 2.6.x

Apache Jetspeed -2

Look and Feel 19 16 8

Security 19 16 16

Functional Features 18 15 15

Content Management System (CMS) 35 20 15

Community & Collaboration 36 17 17

Standards 25 20 14

Support 8 8 8

Cost 9 9 9

RANKING 1 2 3

Liferay has achieved the highest score and thereby is ranked at the top of the list followed by JBoss in second spot and Apache in third. Liferay stands well above the others in the areas of content management, community and collaboration as well as functional features and security. It shows up as the best-fit open source software solution that can address an organization's requirements for an enterprise wide Portal initiative.

Conclusion and Recommendation



Fulcrum Logic is a 30m US$ global information technology services provider and business consulting organization, headquartered in New Jersey with offices in California, Europe & India. Fulcrum's suite of services empowers business by leveraging technology in order to attract new customers; increase efficiency; reduce operating costs; and boost customer satisfaction. Since1999, Fulcrum Logic has worked closely with a large number of organizations worldwide to make them build stronger, more efficient and more agile businesses. With more than 750 professionals at 5 global delivery centers, we have distilled the key elements from successful projects and honed our services and solutions to meet customer needs.

To learn more about our service offerings, visit www.fulcrumlogic.com

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comparitive evaluation of portals - liferay, jboss, apache jetspeed

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