Current GA stable branch

uPortal 4.0 is the previous stable, production-targeted, general audience release branch. If you're a new adopter or a current adopter upgrading, plausibly the version you want is the latest available General Audience uPortal 4.0.something release, which is uPortal 4.0.15 as of this writing.

Versions

Overview

uPortal 4.0 supports version 2.0 of the Portlet specification (JSR-286), removes IChannel support, includes a new customization UI and updated UIs for groups, permissions and user management. New 'under the hood' features such as a refactored rendering pipeline also improve speed and memory usage of the portal.

Requirements

JDK 1.6.0_26 or newer
Servlet API 2.5 or newer

Release Notes

Below is a summary of all the high-level improvements and new features in uPortal 4.0

Portlet 2.0 Support

Inter-Portlet Communication via Events
Resource request support for AJAX and binary content delivery
ETag based caching support including browser-side ETag pass-through for resource URLs
IChannel support has been removed

Administrative Tools

New user interface for groups and permissions administration
Delegate administration of groups and permissions
Unified user management tool that integrates attribute management for local users, swapper utilities, and limited password-reset support.

UI Improvements

New unified layout management interface
Users may subscribe to optional pre-packaged tabs
Default skin updated with a clean, modern look and feel
Provides a better starting point for custom skin development

Internationalization

New unified message file for all view types
Minor i18n support improvements all over the framework

Mobile Support

Updated mobile theme with jQuery Mobile support
uMobile native app framework connection features included out of the box

Integration

New Grouper group service implementation allows use of Grouper groups within uPortal
CAS Clearpass features and sample implementation included in build
Portlet Event based searching allowing any portlet to contribute search results to the uPortal Search dialog

New portlets bundled with uPortal

News/RSS
Google Gadgets

Data Import/Export

Portal data file formats defined by XML Schemas
Simplified import/export code using JAXB

Rendering Pipeline

Using StAX and XSLTc for improved performance
Broken out into bite-size components which can be mixed, matched, and quickly customized
Allows for multiple pipelines with different uses. Two are included, the primary pipeline and a JSON pipeline used by uMobile

Portlet Execution Management

Stack trace of a portlet is logged when it times out
The current portlet fname and request type is included in the thread name during portlet execution
Background cleanup of hung portlets to prevent resource leaks

Hangups – Changes in 4.0 that might trip you up

Requires Servlet API 2.5 to run. Tomcat 6.0 is the first version of Tomcat to support Servlet 2.5
Requires JDK 6.0
Data export and import is required when upgrading.