On Thursday Red Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of its next-generation portal solution, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 The advent of JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 marks the next stage in Red Hat’s goal of providing the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of middleware products. Organizations worldwide now have a flexible, open source alternative for building, deploying, integrating and managing on-premise and cloud-based applications.

“With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat provides the middleware components necessary for organizations to standardize their application architecture with confidence using a flexible approach to accommodate user choice”, said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager for middleware, Red Hat. “JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 provides users the interaction capabilities necessary to build and deploy rich web-based applications.”

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is designed to reduce the time and cost associated with creating, deploying and managing dynamic web presences. By injecting a series of features related to the JBoss Open Choice philosophy, such as the JBoss Portlet Bridge, applications and developer skills can more easily be leveraged into the portal without re-engineering. JBoss Open Choice is Red Hat’s strategy to provide middleware that provides a lightweight, flexible architecture to support the greatest variety of programming models, languages and deployment options. JBoss Enterprise Middleware supports the choice of the developer and architect regardless of whether they are designing applications for Java Enterprise Edition, Spring Framework, Seam, Google Web Toolkit, Ruby, Groovy, PHP and a host of other frameworks and programming choices.

“JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 in combination with the JBoss Portlet Bridge has allowed the development of the CITYTECH Reseller Portal custom portlets to take advantage of the well known Seam, JSF, and RichFaces frameworks rather than coding against the Portlet API. Because it is based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, our JBoss and JEE expertise has transferred well, particularly in the areas of application deployment and administration, and we are confident that our application will be able to meet future scalability and performance requirements,” said Matt Van Bergen, CTO, CITYTECH, Inc. “With the core application in place, we expect to rapidly add additional customer self service functionality with a reduced time to market.”

Open source portals are gaining traction in the market, and according to the Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals” report, Gartner analysts see open source portal deployments growing. “By 2011, Gartner expects at least 15% of new enterprise portal projects in Global 2000 firms to use open-source horizontal portal frameworks”. Additionally, “Gartner sees a shift in the dynamics of a horizontal portal market driven by the combination of enterprise-grade, open-source alternatives with cloud computing.”*

In addition to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, Red Hat is also announcing the availability of a Technical Preview of the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, a rich web content management and workflow product to address an organization’s web content needs, powered by eXo. Site Publisher is a new, optional add on component to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 providing an additional set of web content management features. Site Publisher is expected to be a fully supported add-on component released concurrently with future JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform releases.

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio, a comprehensive family of open source middleware software products to enable developers and organizations to build, deploy, integrate and manage applications on-premise and within the cloud. These products include the JBoss application platform family, which are flexible application platform products for deploying both lightweight and highly transactional applications. JBoss Enterprise SOA and integration platform products provide the software necessary for integrating disparate business processes, while JBoss Developer Studio and frameworks provide the tools necessary for creating dynamic applications.