Demo portal

I am teaching a module about J2EE portals, and I am looking for an appropriate platform to use. My institution uses WebCT which is hopeless - not a portal, not even a nice web environment, although we are promised an upgrade - added to which, I would like to teach the material using the tools themselves. So far, I have had a go with uPortal, Liferay and eXo, and I have only just thought about putting the experience in the blog.

Thoughts so far?

uPortal
Seems quite simple to administer; somewhat restrictive in terms of layout options, though. I haven't spent much time with this one, but I didn't like the way that porlets take over the whole display space when active. Maybe this can be configured...

Liferay
Again relatively simple to install, but restrictive in terms of layout - I assume you can get down into the depths, but I don't have that kind of time. Seemed to come with a lot of portlets, including the ones I was particularly interested in using. However, some of the important ones didn't work (chat, instant message, meeting room). Refresh rate was a bit slow - default 15 mins - but again, I guess that could be changed...

eXo
This was as easy to install as the others in the first instance when I just got the binary distribution. However, I spent a long time trying to work out how to change the content of the default pages, and was about to give up in despair when I came across a little forum message saying that there was a bug in the current distribution. Thanks for making that obvious, guys! The soution required the building of the jars from scratch which proved to be a lot more difficult. This process first required the installation of Apache maven. This in itself proved difficult because of unsatisfied dependencies. The same sort of thing happened when trying to use maven to build eXo. I ended up scavenging the missing jars from the eXo src distribution (yet another download).
I persevered with eXo because its interface was the most attractive and flexible (in theory). However, a number of problem came up that made me look elsewhere. These and the dependency problems are documented in the next post.

The documentation for all of these systems is sketchy. The only way to really tell what functioanlity is included is to download it an try it out, and that takes a great deal of time. Also, there seems to be a dearth of information about JSR168-compliant portlets that are available to download. There is a project called GEMS at java.net which intends to build up a portlet collection, but there's not much there yet. Perhaps the developers at uPortal, Liferay and eXo could start posting their portlets there...?

I am currently looking at Zope/Plone which is not strictly speaking a J2EE portal, but may well be the easiest option for use in the module. More on this to follow...