Sun Microsystems and the OpenPortal community announced a new open source initiative with Liferay to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from both companies. Developers will now have access to a new, stable, standards-based Web presentation platform. The Sun and Liferay products resulting from this initiative will bring developers simple, lightweight presentation capabilities for GlassFish, Sun's open source Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server.

Sun and Liferay also plan to separately market and sell products and services based on the commonly developed open source platform, offering customers additional functionality and more choice depending on features and level of support needed. Sun is also announcing the preview release of a lightweight platform for simplifying Web site development and building collaborative work spaces. Sun's new platform also allows Web developers to incorporate role-based access to content and applications, adding an extra layer of security and control to their portals.

"The GlassFish community continues to grow and demand open source, enterprise-class solutions. Our association with Liferay and its great platform is an example of multiple communities and partners working together to deliver on the Java software community’s requests," said Mark Herring, vice president of marketing, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems. "As Sun's involvement in open source expands, customers and developers can expect to see new models of collaboration within open source software communities in an effort to drive adoption of interesting technologies."

Sun's new platform will provide customers and Web developers with the following features:

• Multi-language support
• Widget syndication
• Workflow API
• Simplification of page development and maintenance in Web-oriented architectures
• Flexibility of licenses

"Liferay is one of the most mature and active open source communities for portal and Web presentation technologies with more than 50,000 downloads per month and more than 8,000 registered users," said Brian Chan, creator and chief software architect, Liferay. "While we will continue to support all major servlet containers, we've seen a big increase in demand for Liferay Portal running on GlassFish - growing from one to 15 percent of our downloads -- and we saw this as a great opportunity to work with Sun's GlassFish and OpenPortal communities to offer enterprises more choices, flexibility and greater access to the latest technologies."

The Liferay community is leveraging the open source Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Portlet Container (JSR 286 - portlet specification 2.0) implementations from the Sun sponsored Open Portal Community. All three products -- Sun's new platform for collaborative Web site design, Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 and Liferay Portal 5.0 -- utilize the same Portlet Container and WSRP implementations. Liferay has added support for OpenSSO, a Sun-sponsored open source project that enables single sign-on capabilities and simplifies Portal access for users. Liferay has also certified the Liferay Portal 5.0 to run on GlassFish, the MySQL database server, the Solaris Operating System (OS), and Sun hardware, such as the Sun Fire X2100 M2 server.

For more information on Sun Microsystems contact Cate Hanley, Cate.Hanley@bitepr.com at Bite Communications.