It's been awhile since I've taken a serious look at Jetspeed 2. I liked Jetspeed 1.x for the most part, but couldn't get past all of the Avalon stuff and how hard it is to deploy a simple portlet (never mind that the portlet wasn't even a JSR-168 portlet). And for the longest time, it seemed that Jetspeed 2 offered precious little more functionality than the primitive Pluto portal.
But then I decided to fire up the latest build of Jetspeed 2 yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this project is moving along nicely. From what I've seen, it's almost as feature-complete as the Jetspeed 1.x project. There are a few things missing (for example, I can't figure out how I as a user can choose a custom theme), but in many ways it's a lot further along than JBoss Portal 2.0 which was released a few days ago.
The nicest part is that deploying a JSR-168 portlet in JS2 is super-easy. Just follow the instructions from my Pluto deployment blog entry right up to the point you have a WAR file created. Then drop that WAR file in ${JETSPEED_HOME}/WEB-INF/deploy. Voila! The portlet app is ready to be used without having to manually muck around with portlet registry files or page definition files (as you must do with Pluto). Couldn't be easier.
On a related note, I am pleased to see much progress being made on the Spring Portlet MVC project. I'll be presenting on Spring Portlet MVC in August at the LoneStar Software Symposium in Austin, for those of you who are interested in this sort of thing.
I was planning to use Pluto to test-drive my presentation examples, but now I'm thinking that Jetspeed 2 looks a lot nicer. In fact, the example portlets that come with Spring Portlet MVC run without a hitch under Jetspeed 2.
