BEA has released WebLogic Portal 9.2 to general availability, along with WebLogic Server and WebLogic for Workshop 9.2, the first GA release of WebLogic Workshop on the Eclipse platform. This marks the first public release of BEA's WebLogic Portal based on Server 9 and J2EE 1.4 technology, and includes major enhancements:

• Federated portals building on WSRP 1.1, with:
  • full identity propagation using SAML 1.1
  • interception of producers/consumers
  • WSRP-enablement of Struts, PageFlow, or JSF applications on regular WebLogic Server or WebLogic Express installations
  • remote consumer entitlements, remote inter-portlet communication, and custom data transfer
  • support for federating menu books, full pages, or portlets.
  • federated user profiles using the W3C Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) specification.
• Full content management with
  • content templates, inheritance, nesting and linking
  • change management & versioning
  • custom workflows
  • WebDAV support
  • 3rd-party CMS plugin through JSR-170
• Full community framework for collaboratives desktops
• GroupSpace, a community application template for
  • document sharing
  • issue tracking
  • rich text editing
  • syndicated content management with RSS
  • threaded discussion groups
• PIM integration with Lotus Notes & Exchange
• Integrated Autonomy search for file, HTTP, ODBC
• Native JavaServer Faces, JSR-168, Struts, Beehive PageFlow, URL-based, QuickClip, and custom JSP Portlet support
• Portal inventory management and propagation between multiple deployments, such as development, staging, and production
• Asynchronous portlet rendering with IFRAMEs or AJAX
• Pluggable portlet and data caching, using internal or 3rd party caches

Full WLP 9.2 documentation is available on edocs.bea.com. This also is the first public release of Workshop for WebLogic based on the Eclipse platform. V8.1 Portal and/or Workshop projects can be migrated into the new environment, modifying annotations to the new Java SE 5 standard syntax and from WLW 8.1 controls to Apache Beehive controls. WebLogic Server v9.2 new features include:

• Support for custom XACML v2.0 roles and policies
• Data: Dynamic multi data sources for dynamic database cluster add/remove (with Oracle RAC) and MS SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver support
• Messaging: Client-side JMS store and forward, automatic consumer failover, and unit-of-work JMS message groups
• Web Services: SOAP 1.2, WS-SecureConversations (Feb 2005) support, Streaming SOAP attachments, multiple Web Service transports (HTTP/S & JMS), and WS-Addressing based callbacks
• Filtering classloaders to specify specific classes to be loaded from the application vs. the system classpath
• Job scheduling through a cluster-aware implementation of the Apache Commons Timer API
• Future response API for HTTP servlets, splitting request from response threads for long-running operations

Full WLS 9.2 documentation is available on edocs.bea.com.

Weblogic Portal and Integration were supposed to be together as Platform. Without even BETA of Integration, release Portal wont help enterprises that deploy everything on platform or has even a bit of workflow login in their Project.

I heard a december date. Also will SPI be released at the same time for all of the above products, in particular the weblogic server?

Congratulations: this technology based criterions sounds all really very nice and I can say from my own experiences, that BEA produces good and stable solutions ... But - thinking in Business Categories: Where are the concept for the Business Processes ? This serious question arises by a look to some of the competitors in the Portal-Area, how e.g. SAP with their concept of an Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), based among others on SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP NetWeaver XI (Exchange Infrastructure), Composite Applications (SAP xApps) - all this with possible "native" access (to) and integration of the mySAP Business Processes. Roland SOA & ESA Kompetenznetzwerk SOA & ESA Information & Collaboration-Portal in German Language

Nice of BEA to throw AJAX portlets in 9.2 http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs92/portlets/performance.html#wp1027952 - vineetb

Nice of BEA to throw AJAX portlets in 9.2

I agree. Welcome to the 21st Century, BEA. ;-) STAY METAL! Roy Russo http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/rrusso/

Pluggable portlet and data caching, using internal or 3rd party caches

And supporting Tangosol Coherence out-of-the-box :-) Peace, Cameron Purdy Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java

And supporting Tangosol Coherence out-of-the-box :-)

Cameron, I thought everything supports Tangosol out-of-the-box. Including my Tivo. ;p John Murray Sobetech

And supporting Tangosol Coherence out-of-the-box :-)

They need to integrate ALSB, ALDS and WLI with Coherence too!

It supports Web Services: SOAP 1.2,but I don't konw if it supports BPWS and BPEL .

JavaMail

The WebLogic Portal team welcomes both new and existing customers to this release- your feedback in critical to our future direction as BEA continues to lead the way with great portal technologies. I'll point out that the product itself can be downloaded and evaluated very quickly from bea.com -take a look and decide for yourself what capabilities are there and how it stacks up against the competition. To respond with some of the comments in this thread; I'll point out that it is possible to use WLI 8.1 with WLP 9.2 by exposing process invocations and task list elements remotely. Many existing 8.1 customers were operating in this manner currently. Of course, there will be a WLI 9.2 product available in the market later this year. As well, we have some very powerful technology from our ALBPM product (formerly Fuego) which integrates very well into WLP for building advanced process portals with the ability to simulate your 'as is' and 'to be' workflows. WLP is chosen by some of the largest enterprises on the planet for their sites because it has unprecedented scalability and performance, advanced web based tools for personalizing and customizing the user experience, support for the full-lifecycle through dev-staging-production, and provides the ability to integrate a variety of open-source development models for your portlets. For example, in our new release we provide tooling in Workshop 9.2 / Eclipse to do detailed merging of all portal assets between two environments including Portal Framework, Security, and Content items. This alone can save a large enterprise significant time in getting new iterations of their site live while reducing risk of removing changes to a dynamic and constantly changing production site. Another core enterprise feature is how WLP leverages WLS library modules to allow your groups to package up web assets into reusable and versionable assets with some slick Eclipse based tools. We've also used this feature to allow you to pick and choose which elements of the Portal you need in your project. Our Tangosol partnership is also a great example of how BEA fits into the needs of large, 21st century enterprises. Best Regards, Josh Lannin Lead Product Manager, WebLogic Portal In the interest of accuracy, we noticed that the release says we support WSRP 1.1; there is a WSRP 1.0 and 2.0- but no 1.1. There is no formal certification process for OASIS specs like WSRP, but we comply to the spec and test against the http://wsrptk.sourceforge.net project.

Maybe many guys are principally interested in technical issues - that's ok ... On the other site existing many people here - which are working daily with Business Integration Themes and are very interested to hear some corresponding answers to the other important questions - how e.g. the capabilities for the Integration of existing or new Business Processes from the solutions (ERP,..) of different manufacturers. What other kind of comercial Business Solutions (e.g. SAP, Oracle, ...) are destinated by the Portal-Solution and in which manner ? Roland SOA Kompetenznetzwerk SOA & ESA Information & Collaboration-Portal in German Language

For BPM, BEA will be rolling out the new version of WLI and acquired Fuego on March 1st. It's a little dated, but this is a pretty good review of BPM products; http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903412&pgno=1 Eric (BEA)

For BPM, BEA will be rolling out the new version of WLI and acquired Fuego on March 1st.

It's a little dated, but this is a pretty good review of BPM products;

http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903412&pgno=1

Eric (BEA)

For BPM, BEA will be rolling out the new version of WLI and acquired Fuego on March 1st.

It's a little dated, but this is a pretty good review of BPM products;

http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903412&pgno=1

Eric (BEA)

So, will WLI be released on March 1st 2007 or it will be released sometime this year. Any dates? BETA Release Dates?

Any body has a deck on comparison between the two? Pls make sure the deck be as unbiased as possible to benefit the members here...

After using bea portal for some time we figured out its not meant for large websites, with lots of development teams working on parallel projects with shared code. *autogenerated code is hard to follow and merge branches. *content selector is as good as crap with performances like 20 to 30 seconds to load a page - that was after bea consultant spent 3 days optimizing it *JPF is a big NO. dont even go there. * Personalization has a big cost of ldap, database sycnronization etc. *whole idea of pages, books, desktop makes no sense as book can have pages and pages can have books etc etc. JCP has to come into that standardization also. If not JSR 286 may be later. It sucks to get locked in such proprietory level of an app server. Performacne of portal container overall is bad and if you can get away with portal look and feel with better web page design - go for it. Cost of portal for us has been too much for what it brings. So think a million times before getting into portal - not just bea portal - any portal vendor. there is too much proprietory stuff and less standards...

Shawn, I don't know what happened with your project, but I disagree with your statement. "its not meant for large websites, with lots of development teams working on parallel projects with shared code" I don't know the specifics of this complaint, but it sounds like a classic use case for federation, which is quite common with our customers now. By using WSRP (a standard), you can divide a larger portal up into many smaller deployments. As one development team revs its component, it need not affect the rest of the deployed Portal components. As for code sharing, there are many ways to attack that problem. From each component using its own copy of a JAR built from a single code base, to creating a service layer using your SOA technology of choice, to using the "Shared J2EE Libraries" that WebLogic Server has implemented in 9.2. As for your other comments: *autogenerated code is hard to follow and merge branches. = Not enough info here to comment. *content selector is as good as crap with performances = Many customers use them happily, so I don't think your experience is typical. In the BEA Repository, they are translated to a DB query. Did a DBA analyze why the queries were taking so long? There is also a feature called "explicit properties" that can dramtically help query performance. *JPF is a big NO. dont even go there. = OK, web frameworks are like religion and one size does not fit all. That's why WLP supports writing portlets using Pageflows, Struts, JSF, Facelets, JSR 168, plain JSP, iFrame, etc. * Personalization has a big cost of ldap, database sycnronization etc. = Not certain to what you are referring to, but is sounds like you object to the performance for the retrieval of profile data. The out of the box providers cache profile data, and if you implement a custom provider you should do the same. Please see the UUP docs. *whole idea of pages, books, desktop makes no sense as book can have pages and pages can have books etc etc. = Some of our customers like the ability to deeply nest pages, and end up deploying thousands of portlets in massive desktops with hundreds of pages. If you prefer simplicity, you don't need to nest pages. You could create a desktop with a single level of pages. * JCP has to come into that standardization also. If not JSR 286 may be later. It sucks to get locked in such proprietory level of an app server. = The standardization to date has been at the portlet level. WSRP and JSR 168 are both supported by WLP. WebLogic Portal aggressively works to support specs as they become final. Regards, Peter Laird WLP Architect

Hi..Peter, How easy is it to integrate SAML into BEA Portal & how far does the Portal handles the security vulnerabilities as posted on owasp.org. Regards, P

I'm lost, has anyone found instructions on how to import an existing jsr-168 war into BEA WLP 9.2?

Can someone out there please direct me as to where I can get a JRockit runtime licence. I try to run JRockit and get: com.jrockit.memleak.comm.MemLeakControllerException: There was a problem with the license on the server: 'Error: Can not find component Memory Leak Detector for JRockit * in the license file. Please check http://www.jrockit.com/license for license updates.' ... Trouble is that http://www.jrockit.com gives a 404 !!! O/S = Win XP thanks for any help.

Hi Andy, For versions of JRockit < R26, the license can be found here: http://dev2dev.bea.com/jrockit/jrockit.license For versions of JRockit >= R26, please follow the instructions here: http://dev2dev.bea.com/jrockit/tools.html Kind regards, Marcus

Appending some basics for Workshop for WebLogic that were omitted in the original post... Workshop for WebLogic v9.2 new features include:

• Built on Eclipse 3.1 and WTP 1.0.3
• Java Web Services, a JSR181 implementation with WebLogic Server extensions like:
  • Asynchronous callbacks
  • State management with conversations
  • Ease of iterative development with the test browser are carried forward from version 8.1.
  • Reliable messaging with JMS and WS-Reliability
  • Digital Signature and HTTPS support with WS-Security/WS-Policy
• Beehive NetUI: a web application framework based on Apache Struts. Introduced in 8.1 as Page Flow technology, Beehive NetUI has evolved into an open source web application framework. Version 9.2 includes advanced tooling features to help developers build Beehive NetUI applications, including graphical tools for JSP and Page Flow controller authoring.
• Beehive Controls: a lightweight component framework based upon annotated JavaBeans. Beehive controls provide an easy to use client model for accessing a variety of J2EE resource types. The built-in controls introduced in 8.1 (database, EJB, JMS and web service controls) are available as system controls in 9.2. You can also create your own custom controls using a new, transparent, POJO architecture.
• Java Server Faces integration
  • Support for JSF pages in NetUI Beehive applications
  • Tools support for JSF backing files and event handlers
  • Integration of JSF with the Beehive NetUI lifecycle
• Comprehensive Java 5 Annotation support
• Upgrade tools for Workshop 8.1 users
  • Pre-upgrade reporting that doesn't affect the original source code
  • Automatic handling of application and project structure upgrade
  • Automatic file extension renaming
  • Wizard and command line versions of the upgrade tool are available

-Pieter Humphrey, BEA Systems