Sun Web Space training (day 1)

Monday, 29 june 2009, Brussels / Belgium.

It was a warm day, and extremely bussy with several traffic jams in and around Brussels.
But that couldn’t stop me from arriving in time for attending a brand new training on Glassfish Web Space, internally organised by Sun.
This training is given by Allan Foster (USA), Sun Architect Web Space / OpenSSO / Glassfish.

The first impression was really cool. Webspace supports all kind of open standards like JSR-286, WSRP 2.0, JSR-170 (Content Management API), SAW API for workflows.
But it also supports Web 2.0, Wiki’s, Blogs, Fora. Building up a portal in Webspace is like having all required tools in one framework. It uses Liferay Portal as the core framework.

Around a year ago Oracle introduced WebCenter as their number one future Middleware stack. Web Space has a somewhat same kind of feel. The only difference is that Web Space is build around open standards, and it is 100% open source. The source code (around 1,3 Gigs) is also available for downloading through the Glassfish Update center.

It is possible to setup Web Space in 2 different ways:

- The easy way, is downloading the install file which contains Glassfish and Webspace, all setup together with some portlets, widgets and all kinds of ingredients to setup a demo application. This method is especially helpful when developers want to have a grip on the system, and do some proof of concepts.

- The other way is to deploy (with the help of an administration guide) the Web Space WAR file on an existing Glassfish server. This way is particularly for setting up a production environment. This way also gives you the freedom for hooking up Web Space with a custom database environment like Oracle 11g, OpenSSO with Active Directory, or an own LDAP system. The Web Space source code also contains custom SQL scripts for deploying a scheme on the database that is used for the user management build in Webspace. The user management itself is like a service module layer together with a persistence layer supporting 100% CRUD functionality.

Some little side effects. The Web Space development team suspects that a future 10.0.4 version will have a better behavior inside a Glassfish cluster environment. It is possible to setup Web Space in a cluster, but at some level the administrator still has a lot of work to do by hand. On the other side, everything is described inside the extensive Administration documentation.

The first day we did some install and update routines, and some administration setup routines like creating new users / groups / roles / communities, and some portal pages. (public and private) As a bonus we also setup a little workflow routine through the administration portlets.

That’s it for day one.