Jasig is proud to announce the release of uPortal 4.0, the latest version of the leading portal framework developed by and for Higher Education! uPortal is a powerful, flexible, scalable, standards based open source enterprise integration portal platform enabling personalization, customization, and integration. This major release supports version 2.0 of the Portlet specification (JSR-286), includes new customization, groups, permissions and user management UIs. 'Under the hood' improvements in the rendering pipeline and caching improve speed and memory usage of the portal. uPortal is a built by Higher Education for Higher Education.
uPortal 4, including a quick-start distribution, is available for download at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download. Features, benefits and support information is available at http://www.uportal.org.
uPortal 4 supports Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286), implementing inter-portlet communication via events, resource URLs for AJAX, and the other requirements of the specification. This means that adopters can build custom portlets using the latest portlet development techniques and frameworks, including the latest Spring Portlet MVC and Spring Web Flow releases (and thereby take advantage of Spring 3). This is a tremendous step forward in the portlet development APIs afforded to adopters.
uPortal 4 also ships demonstrating inclusion of Google Gadgets in the portal, affording an API totally different from JSR-286 for developing custom portal-delivered experiences.
uPortal 4 ships with improved out of the box user experiences for layout management and administration, and provides a better starting point for custom skin development.
uPortal 4 ships delivering traditional desktop browser as well as mobile browser appropriate markup with jQuery Mobile support. uPortal 4 also supports the optional free and open source uMobile native mobile applications. This makes uPortal 4 a viable platform for delivering mobile browser experiences out of the box, and provides a path to even richer native mobile application experiences.
uPortal 4 ships with a new unified message file approach to internationalization support and improved i18n support throughout.
uPortal has long offered flexible and pluggable groups service, and now ships with support for using Grouper groups within uPortal. uPortal has long offered excellent CAS support, including support for using CAS proxy tickets in portlets, and now ships demonstrating this, as well as integration with the ClearPass CAS extension providing optional support for making the end user password available to portlets concurrently with use of CAS. Portlet Event based searching allows any portlet to contribute search results to the uPortal Search dialog.
uPortal 4 provides improved data import/export formats, definitions, and improved support for executing on these imports and exports.
uPortal 4 ships with improved administrative tools supporting delegated administration of groups and permissions, as well as management of portal-local users.
A refactored rendering pipeline affords greater modularity and flexibility, but uPortal 4 demonstrates the potential in this out of the box by leveraging that flexibility to provide better-performing smarter-caching implementations of rendering pipeline components. uPortal 4 is faster and better under the hood.
uPortal 4 doesn't just support the latest portlet APIs, it provides great support for these APIs, with an execution environment that provides helpful debugging information when portlets time out or fail and which cleans up after portlets even when they won't clean up after themselves. This makes uPortal 4 a more supportive development environment and platform for delivering your custom portlets.
For more information the features and benefits of uPortal, see http://www.uportal.org.
