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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
Jetspeed lets you focus on building connections to outside resources, such as Web services, databases, and content feeds. It features built-in services for user interface customization, caching, persistence, and user authentication. As a portal developer, you don't have to build any of those services yourself; instead, you can concentrate on retrieving external data and displaying it. Jetspeed doesn't place any restrictions on what resources portlets may access.
Each user has individual settings for displaying portlets on his or her portal, for both wireless and Web access. Some portlets
may only work on the Web, while some may also work on mobile devices; users can have different portlets for each. User authentication
is abstracted through interfaces, and you can implement the authenticate() method on the UserManager interface from Turbine (provided as part of Jetspeed) or you can replace the method with a pluggable authentication module.
You could use that module as part of a single sign-on solution, in which your portal handles frontend authentication, or to
access an existing database of user information.
To display content, portlets use the Element Construction Set (ECS) API, which generates markup elements from Java objects. ECS supports the Wireless Markup Language (WML) as well as HTML and XML, and is open source under the Apache license. It is available from the Jakarta Apache Project; however, the ECS jar file is bundled with Jetspeed, so no additional downloads are necessary. It may be easier to use a servlet-based template or Web publishing technology, such as JSPs, WebMacro, or Velocity, to generate content for your portlet. ECS can run a servlet and capture the output in an ECS element, which may then be used as the displayed content.
Without any Java programming, you can easily set up Jetspeed to get news headlines and content from other Websites. Jetspeed
can use both the RSS (RDF Site Summary) and OCS (Open Content Syndication) formats. RSS is an XML format used for syndicating
Web headlines. Websites publish RSS feeds to anyone on the Internet interested in retrieving them. The headlines link back
to the publishing Website for the article's full content. The OCS format describes multiple-content channels, including RSS
headlines. To configure new content channels for Jetspeed, add them to your WEB-INF/conf/jetspeed-config.jcfg file.
Jetspeed is built on top of Turbine, an open source application framework from the Jakarta Apache Project. Most Apache projects are either built on Turbine or integrated with it. Some of Jetspeed's concepts, such as screens and user information, are borrowed from Turbine.
Jetspeed can sit on a number of servlet runners and databases. We'll be using the Tomcat 3.2 servlet runner, also from the Jakarta Apache Project. Tomcat also acts as a Web server, so you won't need an additional HTTP server.
Jetspeed is bundled with Thomas Mueller's Hypersonic SQL database. Tables are already created and populated with user data
in Hypersonic SQL. Hypersonic SQL runs in process to Jetspeed (and Tomcat), so no additional configuration is necessary. If
you want to use a different database, such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, or Postgres, you must set up the database using
the SQL scripts included with the Jetspeed source code. In addition, you must configure the TurbineResources.properties file that Jetspeed and Turbine use to point to the new database server.
I recommend that you use the Hypersonic SQL database. The most common complaint on the Jetspeed users mailing list is that configuring a new database, like MySQL, doesn't work. If you do run into problems with another database, first check the Jetspeed and Turbine mailing list archives for other developers' experiences with the software (see Resources). Jetspeed uses Turbine's database connection code. Of course, you can use any database from your portlet; Jetspeed just uses Hypersonic SQL internally.
To install Jetspeed, follow these three steps:
webapps directory.
mail.server property in Jetspeed's TurbineResources.properties, which resides in the webapps/jetspeed/WEB-INF/conf subdirectory under the directory where you installed Tomcat.
Detailed installation instructions are available on the Jetspeed Webpage; see Resources for a link.
Jetspeed is packaged as a war file, and can be dropped into Tomcat's webapps directory. You'll need to restart Tomcat if it's already running.
The testing URL for Jetspeed is http://localhost:8080/jetspeed/. If you change Tomcat's default port, replace 8080 with your new port number. You can log in using turbine as both your username and password, or just use the default configuration without logging in.
When you develop new portlets for Jetspeed, use the AbstractPortlet class as a base. This is in the org.apache.jetspeed.portal.portlets package. By extending AbstractPortlet, you can have a working portlet by implementing the getContent() method. The getContent() method also takes an implementation of the RunData interface from Turbine as a parameter. By accessing get or set methods from the RunData interface, you have access to the runtime information stored in Turbine, including cookies, locale, and user data. Most of
this data is actually handled by Jetspeed itself, and isn't needed for portlet development.