eXo Social is the first of the eXo projects to get the “developer docs treatment.”  This documentation will show you how to extend your apps with social features. You will learn how to publish activities, add contacts, create spaces, invite people, plug your own backend for user profile, use the OpenSocial API, and a lot more. It contains everything you need to social-enable your existing apps.

Developers – check it out, and let us know what you’d like to see added.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA (July 21, 2010) – eXo today announced the eXo Early Adopter Program designed to give Java enterprises access to the training and technical resources they need to begin rolling out cutting-edge, rich Java applications built on eXo Platform 3.0. The company’s much-anticipated flagship offer, planned for general availability by the end of the year, has been re-architected with the fast, modern portal framework co-developed by eXo and Red Hat, GateIn.

In recent months, eXo has delivered new and updated community versions of all the key components in eXo Platform 3.0 to run on GateIn 3.0: eXo Social, eXo Content, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge. The Early Adopter Program goes beyond a beta program, and instead offers eXo’s most innovative customers and other Java enterprises a realistic path to modernizing their legacy Java applications.

The training and developer support offered through the Early Adopter Program is designed to help developers begin prototyping a new breed of rich, interactive, social Java applications that can run popular Java environments such as JBoss, Spring, Tomcat or IBM WebSphere. Applications developed today will be compatible with the GA release. These services will be delivered by eXo’s technical product leaders.

Program Details

• Early access to all updates between now and final GA.
• Three-hour web-based trainings on all eXo components comprising eXo Platform 3.0.
• One-year Developer Subscriptions, giving users support on community and beta releases.
• Discounts on eXo Platform 3.0 Production Subscriptions down the road.
• Participation in the Early Adopter Program is a one-time $5,000 fee, which can be applied to the future purchase of a Production Subscription.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “The enthusiasm we’re seeing for eXo Platform 3.0, even in this early stage, validates the heavy investment we’ve made to deliver the best user experience platform on the market for Java enterprises. The Early Adopter Program, which we initially opened to select customers, has been so well received that we’re opening it up to more enterprises looking for a ‘SharePoint’ of their own that would work with their existing Java systems and make the most of their Java talent. This program puts the power of the eXo Platform in developers’ hands, with a practical roadmap to get them from design and development to production.”

Online Resources

• Overview of the Early Adopter Program
• Learn more about eXo Platform 3.0
• Download the eXo white paper on “Java Middleware for Cloud Services”

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Android:

• android-cmis-browser: The Android CMIS Browser enables the user to browse and search a CMIS content repository.

Firefox plugin:

• developing a CMIS client for firefox: This article presents an overview of a new proposed standard for accessing content, namely Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), and provides an example of how to use these services using Mozilla Firefox.

Flex/air:

• CMIS spaces: CMIS Spaces RIA clients (Flex+AIR, Flex+Browser) are for ECM / CMS servers supporting the Content Management Interoperability Services standard.
• cmis-explorer: An Adobe AIR application for browsing CMIS compliant repositories.

Java:

• Apache Chemistry:Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java implementation of the CMIS , consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above.
• CMIS fileshare: CMIS FileShare comes with a simple CMIS Browser that is able to browse repositories with a CMIS AtomPub interface.

Javascript:

• JQuery-cmis: A Javascript client for parsing response from a CMIS server using JQuery.

.Net:

• NCMIS: Dotnet library that will implement the core of the Content Management Interoperability Services standards proposal (CMIS) along with a toolbox for building your own implementations of CMIS.
• CMIS4Sharepoint: open source implementation of CMIS standards for SharePoint Platform (WSS3.0 & MOSS2007).

PHP:

• CMIS API of drupal: The CMIS API project aims to provide a generic API for integrating with CMIS compliant Enterprise CMS systems.

Python:

• CMIS lib: Provides a CMIS client library for Python that can be used to work with CMIS-compliant repositories

Shell:

• CMIS shell: Command line client for CMIS (made in java)

Web UI:

• Cara: web application that provides a single interface to Documentum, SharePoint and Alfresco.
• WeWebU OpenWorkdesk: (CMIS not released yet, Q2) Suite of application on top of JSR170 and CMIS

If I forgot any library or client, ping me on twitter @jeremi or in the comments. I’m going to try to keep this list up to date.

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Join eXo Platform for a free one-hour webinar on 24 February, 2010, when we will provide a quick overview of the CMIS spec, an intro to the features of xCMIS, and a step-by-step tutorial for creating gadgets that can make your newly-unlocked content even more useful.

The CMIS specification promises great benefits for application developers – your content applications no longer have to be tied to their respective content repositories. When building new applications, you can now access content in multiple repositories, without concern for the development platform and language dependencies of these separate content systems. eXo Platform is adding to these interoperability benefits with xCMIS, the new CMIS implementation from eXo Platform.

Go to the complete webinar overview and Register now!

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The inherent challenge to developing software is maintaining and improving the quality of the code as you add features and expand the codebase over time.
To manage our code quality, we rely on Sonar. Sonar provides us views ranging from a high level global dashboard down to the most granular detail about individual lines of code – from these we can extract quality indicators from our code development.

GateIn, the new portal that eXo is co-developing with JBoss, provides a dashboard where you can install gadget and customize them. So we wrote gadgets that you can add to your dashboard and customize to your needs. As Gadget is a standard, it’s also working in Jira. Arnaud explain more about this:

Managing a product isn’t only about focusing on quality. We also have to deliver on time, meet our subscription customers’ requirements, and incorporate as many community feature requests as possible. To keep an eye on everything, we wanted to leverage the flexible interface of the GateIn portal framework. By integrating Sonar’s gadgets, we’ll be able to quickly create our own set of customized dashboards to track all the metrics we need, like the activity of our teams, development roadblocks, tasks and issues on products, and a lot more. We’re even able to reuse Jira Gadgets in GateIn – it saves us a lot of time and is definitely more effective.

Sonar Gadget in GateIn Dashboard:

Sonar Gadget in Jira4:

If you want to try these gadgets in your own development environment, you can grab them from Google App Gallery. They can work in any standard OpenSocial/gadget container, and they’ve been tested with GateIn and Jira.

If you want to look under the hood, go to the Sonar gadget repository on github or download them. You can also easily add your own metrics to the gadgets.

Links:

• More technical details about the implementation
• Sonar
• eXo and GateIn Sonar instance
• Source code of the Sonar gadgets

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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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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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