The conference is organized on December 15th 2009 at Karthago Le Palace Hotel – Gammarth- Tunis. The Conference program is available here.

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After 10 years developping Java applications and being an active member of the Executive Comitee of Maven, Arnaud just published a book on which he worked more than one year and where he explains the benefits of using Maven in any kind of organization, from the start-up to the large company, through his great experiences of the tool.

Arnaud and Nicolas decided to contribute to the french maven community through this book that aim both newbies and advanced users of the Maven tool. This book, in french language, covers various subjects:
- The project descriptor (POM),
- Dependencies and libraries (Repository management,…),
- Project construction settings (alternative language use like Groovy, …),
- Unit tests, integration tests (dbunit,…), interface tests (selenium), functional tests (fitnesse), performance tests (jmeter), …
- JEE projects,
- Integration to the development environments (eclipse, netbeans, intellij),
- Automatisation of the delivery process,
- Quality management (pmd, checkstyle, findbugs, sonar, …),
- Writting Maven plugins,
- Assembly,
- Projects models (archetypes),
- The future of Maven

The official description for french readers:

Editeur : Pearson France
Collection : Référence
Auteurs : Nicolas De loof, Arnaud Héritier
Niveau : Tous niveaux
Catégorie : Programmation
Prix : 32 €
Référence : 978-2-7440-2337-8
Date de parution : 20 Novembre 2009

Maven, l’outil open-source de gestion et d’automatisation de développement Java, a le vent en poupe. Les raisons : il systématise, rationalise et simplifie le développement collaboratif de projets Java, faisant gagner aux entreprises comme aux développeurs du temps et de l’argent !

Les auteurs, membres de l’équipe de développement Maven, aidés par toute la communauté francophone, ont imaginé de présenter Maven 2 sous un angle original et didactique, à travers un projet fictif, inspiré de leurs expériences sur le terrain, dont ils détaillent toutes les phases successives. Ce projet évolue au fil des besoins et de la contribution de développeurs aux profils différents, vous familiarisant avec les concepts fondamentaux de Maven et leur mise en œuvre pratique, mais aussi avec les fonctionnalités plus avancées. Vous profitez également des recommandations et bonnes pratiques pour optimiser votre utilisation de Maven.

Vous découvrez ainsi de manière ludique et grâce à des exemples concrets le potentiel de Maven, et tous les avantages qu’il peut apporter à vos propres projets.

Sommaire :
- Introduction
- Au-delà de java.lang
- Un peu plus que compiler
- Mettre en place des tests unitaires
- Mettre en place des tests d’intégration
- Gestion avancée des dépendances
- Quand le projet devient trop lourd
- Maven et JEE
- Maven et les IDE
- Le jour J : la livraison
- Utiliser un outil non supporté
- L’assurance qualité
- Respecter un format de distribution
- Un nouveau projet démarre
- Avons-nous fait le bon choix
- Nos recommandations
- Épilogue
- Lexique

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I have made a new video on how to use Gadgets and dynamic languages inside GateIn to quickly build REST APIs and Gadgets on a live GateIn instance

Build Mashups in GateIn from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

What we show here:

- provide a simple text file with a list of adresses, deploy it on GateIn WebDAV drive
- Build with our online IDE a REST API on the cloud (using groovvy language and the JSR 311 specification) that read the content of that file and expose it as a REST service with a simple click
- Consume that REST service within a Gadget and use the Google maps API to do render a map that points to the adress from the file

All live… only on GateIn

By the way, this is also what I demoed at Google Devfest in Argentina:

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eXo Platform is glad to invite you to its first online Webcast to introduce the eXo Enterprise Content Management Suite.

During this online seminar, Tugdual Grall, VP of Business & Product Strategy at eXo Platform will present you:

- How the eXo ECM Suite allows you to manage any type of content (Web or Documents) from a powerful and open enterprise Portal ;

- How you can easily manage documents in your enterprise using shared drives, versionning, permissions, search, and other useful tools provided by eXo Document Management System ;

- how you can easily build mutlitple web sites from one place using the powerful eXo Web Content Management module allowing you to integrate any type of content and application

The presentation will be delivered in English by Tugdual Grall. Register here or contact us for any information regarding the Webcast or anything else.

Best Regards,

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Stay tuned for more on twitter: @eXoPlatform

eXo Knowledge Suite Extension for GateIn from Patrice Lamarque on Vimeo.

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With the signing of this agreement, eXo Platform and BonitaSoft strengthen their technological collaboration. BonitaSoft’s business process management solution will be integrated into eXo DMS’s document management module.

Based on Bonita, BonitaSoft’s open source BPM software, the new version of eXo DMS incorporates advanced features for document collaboration and validation. The addition of Bonita’s BPM capabilities provides eXo Platform customers a powerful and intuitive solution for automating their records management.

The result of four years of successful technical collaboration, the eXo DMS version integrating Bonita was made available to the open source community in 2009. Through this enhanced partnership, eXo Platform and BonitaSoft now offer their customers dedicated support and services for this integrated solution.

“We see a demand for more and more BPM features from the open source community and from our customers. The incorporation of Bonita in our product range allows us to automate and standardize an approach that was previously customized for each project,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform. “Also, through the certification of several eXo Platform modules on the GateIn platform, users are able to extend their portal capabilities with BonitaSoft’s BPM”, said Benjamin.

“We’ve found in eXo Platform a level of expertise in collaborative applications that is capable of addressing the problems of managing the most highly advanced document processes. This partnership really helps to give our customers a head start in mastering their document processes,” said Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO of BonitaSoft.

About BonitaSoft:

Created in 2009 by Miguel Valdes, Rodrigue Le Gall and Charles Souillard, BonitaSoft is the first provider of open source business process management (BPM) software. The Bonita solution has been downloaded more than 150 000 times to date by companies and organizations worldwide. BonitaSoft will democratize the use of BPM in companies of all sizes with an intuitive and powerful solution with an optimum cost. BonitaSoft is a partner of Talend and Bull and is an active member of the OW2 consortium.

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You can download it here

This is an EAR file that you have to deploy in a fresh new GateIn beta 2 installation (download GateIn beta 2)

here is the video:

eXo Social For GateIn from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

And some screenshots

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Emphatically, no.

First, portals are evolving. I reflected in a previous post that “The nature of portals has changed, and with GateIn (eXo + JBoss), we’re seeing portal’s transformation from an aggregator of external applications to a platform for building and delivering services that add value to the user organisation.”

In this world, the question is not whether a developer has to choose between portlets or gadgets but rather, which services are best delivered as gadgets and which as portlets.

At eXo, we do not make a great distinction between a gadget or a portlet. They are merely categorized in a way that makes it easy for users to go and grab more gadgets or portlets to customize their application. The user doesn’t care.

From the developer side, we use portlets for more robust components that take longer to build while gadgets are lighter and take less time to build. The difference comes from the technical aspect behind the scene. Even if we see some similarities in the last specifications, originally portlets were more Java server side components that generate fragments of HTML code while gadgets dynamically generate that HTML on the client side thanks to JavaScript and REST server calls. The main difference is then in the application lifecycle as portlets have to be deployed as WAR packages on the application server while the gadget is just an XML file that can be dynamically added and edited online. Gadgets allows our business users to build applications on the cloud very quickly.

Next generation portals will support both models but this is just one of the building blocks of the platform of tomorrow. Horizontal services like content, mail, calendaring, or profiles are other pieces that can be mashed up together to easily build a custom web application… online. We’re baking functionality into GateIn that will enable it to be the ultimate “mash up” platform for combining and recombining components. Times have changed, let’s be more agile.

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…. and it is OpenSocial compliant!

eXo Social For GateIn from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

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After being in Silicon Valley for a month, I have definitely noticed that things move at a much faster pace here. The network is huge, and thanks to our advisors and professional peers, I’ve been able to tap into this network already. Every week, there’s some conference or event that’s worth checking out. And it is a very active technology community here. On the one hand, I expected this because the Valley is still very much at the center of the global tech industry. On the other hand, I did not realize to what extent all this meant.

One of the pick ups we’ve seen already is in sales opportunities. Just having a presence in the U.S. has enabled eXo to enter accounts where we had been excluded in past. And this came about before we have fully automated marketing and lead generation on our site. This a new level of marketing investment that eXo has not had to consider before, but a crucial step as we adjust from an indirect sales model in Europe to a direct sales model in the North American market. Until now, eXo has sold mostly through ISVs and systems integrator partners such as Bull, Cross Systems, and Business Decision. In Europe, very few significant IT initiatives are undertaken without an SI. It’s a different game in the U.S., and I find myself constantly thinking about repeatable sales processes.

We are also modifying how we productize eXo software. In the European market, we will continue to offer Community Supported Editions of the eXo stack to our public sector customers. Here, we are moving to an Enterprise Edition distribution similar to Red Hat’s RHEL/fedora model. As we refine this packaging, you can expect to hear more about this in the near future.

One last thing we are seeing is a shift in how we sell our offerings. In Europe, open source software was never about cost but rather about access to the source code. Here, we’re anticipating cost to be an important factor in the sales pitch — not so much that we’re cheaper but rather that we provide the best value with our software.

At eXo, we’ve built a low-cost distributed agile team with a huge R&D force. We drive much of the R&D from our centers in Vietnam and The Ukraine; sales operations from Tunisia; and  packaging and conceptualization from France. With sales and marketing strategy now driven out of our U.S. center, we have put in place the final building block to accelerate and sustain eXo’s growth. I am personally very excited to be leading this effort from San Francisco!

On a side note, I will be speaking on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference panel about “Open Social in the Enterprise” next Wednesday, November 4th at 10:15 a.m. If you’ll be in attendance, I hope you will consider sitting in on this. Otherwise, send me an email or tweet if you’d like to meet up.

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• the new layout management for groups and dashboards
• the new skins management with hot deployment support
• a lot of UI enhancements
• an introduction to the great new packaging to easily extend GateIn

GateIn 3.0 beta 2, what is new? from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

You can download GateIn Beta 2 or watch the first video

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As you know, eXo is best known for our early work in portal technologies and standards. The eXo Portal was built in 2003 with the U.S. Department of Defense to aggregate applications for the US Joint Force Command operations. Our decision earlier this summer to merge this portal with the JBoss Portal couldn’t have come at a better time. Forget everything you think you know about “portals.” The nature of portals has changed, and with GateIn (eXo + JBoss), we’re seeing portal’s transformation from an aggregator of external applications to a platform for building and delivering services that add value to the user organisation.

So it’s therefore no surprise that Microsoft is no longer talking about “portal” in its messages about SharePoint 2010, but rather “sites.” This may seem a small change, but one that points to a future when companies will not want to build a website without a platform on which horizontal services can be added easily and managed from a single point. In fact, our customers are already asking for this. They want to be able to manage this platform (and the resulting cost savings, efficiencies, and productivity) from the IT department — not integrate a variety of multi-vendor applications for web content management, workflow, blogs, wikis and social networks used by different teams across the company.

We believe strongly that GateIn will be this platform of the future, today. And because it is open and based on standards, GateIn could become a standard itself. We’ve shown you some early demos and screenshots of GateIn. Today, we released the second beta. Our next step is to get to a GA release, so people can start building valuable services on GateIn.

Which services will be most important for your business? Drop me a note, or send me a tweet @benjmestrallet.

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The conference room was full and it proved an increasing interest for Open Source Portals as decision makers are more and more looking for alternatives to proprietary software.

In the first part of the conference, Bertrand Pinel, Technical Manager at Ippon, explained some technological aspects of the enterprise Portals to make J2EE portals compliant with each other, as the JSR 168 and 286 for the portlet specifications and the JSR 170 for the Java Content Repository.

Then, Ippon Technologies presented its expertise on the eXo stack through the work done for one of its customers: Globecast, which is a subsidiary of France Telecom. Attendees have been able to understand how these tools contributed to improve the time needed to display new information and features to the users and how the portal are integrated to Information Systems already running in the companies.

Through these customer feedbacks, some interesting findings came up:

• Open Source portals are gaining interests and companies are more and more choosing the open source way instead of heavy and locked solutions (like Oracle, IBM and SharePoint);
• Nowadays, the tools are mature enough in terms of features and interfaces to produce real websites with modern designs;
• Some big companies are using the eXo Community edition for critical missions;
• Most clients are using Tomcat as a server for their portal;

Nicolas Martignole, a well known IT expert, author of the blog “Le Touilleur Express“, attended the event and came back with some interesting comments. Here is an extract of his point of view:

“From what I heard, eXo Platform have real products, with Product Managers, like Patrice Lamarque, eXo CS and KS PM. This is interesting because this product-oriented approach is more opened. Where LifeRay is the Office suite, eXo seems to provide different layers that correspond to your needs.”

“And finally, isn’t the eXo modules oriented approach more interesting that the all-or-nothing approach of LifeRay? I write on my notebook… Modules=flexibility=eXo.”

“I then attended the presentation of an Intranet project built with eXo Portal and eXo WCM for Globecast, subsidiary of France Telecom and customer of Ippon Technologies. The Intranet “websites factory” is a content oriented project that aims to ease the communication inside the company and between the different departments. The portal also provides the ability to mash up contents, enables all the teams to work together and to build contents.”

“We also had the opportunity to discuss with Patrice Lamarque, Product Manager at eXo. The new engine version is called GateIn and comes from the partnership between eXo and JBoss. It is a promising product and I think we will have a brand new Portal generation in few months.”

More resources:

• Conference slides (French)
• Ippon Technologies on its conference about Open Source Portals (French)
• Nicolas Martignole, from the blog “Le Touilleur Express”, about the conference (French)

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Contact us to get a free pass to the conference

Séminaire clients eXo Platform

eXo Platform a le plaisir de vous inviter à son séminaire gratuit intitulé “eXo/JBoss : GateIn Le Portail Open Source de référence” le mardi 27 Octobre à partir de 9h.

Dans le domaine des portails et de la gestion de contenus un grand nombre de solutions Open Source existent mais avec le rapprochement d’eXo Platform et de JBoss c’est une nouvelle génération de portail qui est lancée.

eXo Platform édite une des solutions majeures de Portail d’entreprise adoptée aujourd’hui par un certain nombre de Grands Comptes comme le Ministère des Finances Belge, l’Etat de Genève, le Ministère de la Défense, le Groupe M6 ou bien des assurances, dont Generali, avec des volumétries de 2 500 à 30 000 utilisateurs.

Avec ce séminaire, nous vous proposons une matinée à la découverte de la solution d’avenir en terme de collaboration et de gestion de contenus mais également la meilleure alternative aux acteurs traditionnels du marché.

Voici le programme complet du séminaire :

• 09h00 – 09h30 : Enjeux et retours d’expérience sur la gestion de contenus et les portails open source.
• 09h30 – 10h30 : GateIn la nouvelle génération de portail d’intégration développée par JBoss et eXo
• 10h30 – 12h00 : Les modules collaboratifs intégrés au portail (GED, FAQ, Forum, Webmail..) et la gestion de contenus multi-sites
• 12h00 – 12h30 : Discussion libre avec nos “Product managers”

Ce séminaire gratuit se déroulera à Paris, le mardi 27 octobre de 9h à 12h30 et débutera par un petit déjeuner d’accueil à partir de 8h45.

Contactez nous pour un accès gratuit à la conférence

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Formation Publique sur eXo Portal et introduction à GateIn

26 et 27 Octobre 2009

Julien Viet, Product Manager d’eXo Portal, donnera une formation de deux jours afin de revenir sur les options étendues de configuration d’eXo Portal et l’utilisation de ses fonctions clés. Julien vous formera vous et vos équipes à l’utilisation des éléments du portail ainsi que de son modèle organisationnel.

Ancien de JBoss, et à l’origine du projet JBoss Portal, Julien Viet présentera également une introduction à GateIn, le nouveau portail issu de la collaboration entre eXo et JBoss reprenant le meilleur des deux projets.

Venez rencontrez Julien Viet, spécialiste de l’applicatif middleware et membre du groupe d’expertise de la spécification de Portlet 2.0 JSR 286, qui aura tous le temps nécessaire pour répondre à vos questions.

Exploitez toute la puissance d’eXo Portal, Inscrivez vous !

Formation Publique sur la suite eXo ECM

du 28 au 30 Octobre

Benjamin Paillereau, Product Manager de la suite de gestion de contenus eXo ECM, reviendra en détails sur les capacités d’eXo WorkFlow et d’eXo WCM. Benjamin vous accompagnera tout au long des trois jours de formation dans la création de workflows complexes et dans la création de sites en utilisant les capacités de gestion de sites multiples, de leur édition et de gestion de leur publication.

Ce sera également l’occasion pour vous de rencontrer Benjamin Paillereau afin d’en savoir plus sur le future de la suite eXo ECM et de discuter de vos besoins et remarques concernant la gestion de vos contenus d’entreprise.

Maitrisez les fonctions avancées et innovantes d’eXo ECM, Inscrivez vous !

Les deux formations à un prix préférentiel

du 26 au 30 Octobre

Il vous est bien entendu possible d’assister aux deux formations pour un tarif préférentiel. Vous pourrez ainsi bâtir des connaissances solides sur les produits phares d’eXo et rencontrer nos deux experts.

Bulletin d’inscription

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eXo will have a booth in GITEX to meet new partners and present our innovative products to the Middle East companies, governments and organizations specially with our powerful fully RTLized and arabic version platform.

Come meet us in Hall 2, eXo booth C2-20 (part of the Tunisian official delegation), we will be pleased to present you our collaborative and enterprise content management products fully integrated to the new GateIn Portal project.

Don’t hesitate to contact us to fix an appointement or for an eXo demo request during our stay in Dubai (18-22 Oct.)

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eXo founder and CEO Benjamin Mestrallet has relocated from France to run operations from the firm’s new San Francisco office. Mestrallet will have on hand a team of experienced advisors who have proven track records in managing growth, shaping strong leadership and building valuation for young companies. From the Board of Advisors:

• Bob Bickel, co-founder of Bluestone Software, former head of Hewlett-Packard Middleware and, most recently, head of strategy at JBoss and board advisor to Hyperic (acquired by SpringSource), JasperSoft and Funambol, among others;

“eXo has the proven technology, talent and market potential that I look for when considering which companies I’d like be involved with at a strategic level,” noted Bickel. “While enterprise companies have benefited from a wide range of open source options at the operating system and middleware level and with development tools, choices in applications and content services have been limited. This is the next significant opportunity for driving out costs in the enterprise. Given its pioneering history and its successes with large European customers, eXo is primed to lead this charge in North America. I look forward to working with Benjamin and his team to make this happen.”

• Edwin Khodabakchian, co-founder of Feedly.org, and former Oracle vice president of product development and CTO of eCommerce at AOL;

“Benjamin is a smart, dynamic leader who has built up a lean but global company the old fashioned way — with solid technology, hard work and a disciplined eye on the bottom line,” said Khodabakchian. “I believe eXo has a bright future ahead of it and I am honored to have a part in shaping this.”

• Sacha Labourey, most recently co-GM of Red Hat’s JBoss Middleware business and former CTO and European GM of JBoss, Inc.

Labourey, who participated in negotiations on the eXo/Red Hat partnership before stepping down as JBoss co-GM, commented: “eXo is proof that a strong focus on engineering excellence can result in superior products. In the last year, I have come to know firsthand what eXo brings to the market and am consistently impressed by the breadth of its vision and the team’s ability to execute.”

In 2002, eXo delivered the industry’s first Java portlet container, which set in motion a leveling of the playing field in the portal market. This also attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense, who went on to help fund the development of the eXo Portal, which is now merged into the new JBoss GateIn portal project. eXo continues to sell a broad portfolio of open source collaborative software that has been developed through R&D investment from its customers, which rank among the largest enterprises and savviest government agencies in the world.

One of Mestrallet’s first stops in the U.S. will be at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Calif., where he will share some of the innovations eXo Platform is experimenting with in its labs. See the conference agenda at: http://www.e2conf.com/sanfrancisco/.

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