What is the difference between jetspeed 2 and pluto?

Question

I'm looking into implementing one of our internal applications as a portal using portlets, as it has many functionalities and not all of them are required by all users.

I've looking at the Apache protals site and I saw that there are two projects - Jetspeed 2 and Pluto.

Although Jetspeed is described as portal and Pluto as a portlet container, it also provides a portal of its own. What is the real difference between them and their functionalities? Can you recommend which should I start "playing" with?

Answer 1

I have worked extensively with Jetspeed 1. I have been a bit out of the loop since J2 and JSR 186, but here is my best guess. It is only a guess, but I'm confident enough to post it here.

(Assumption: a portal uses a portlet container, and a portlet container cannot really run by itself.)

Jetspeed 2 aims to be a full enterprise portal which uses Pluto as the portlet container. Pluto has its own simple portal, as it does not want a dependency on any given portal project. I believe the Pluto portal is not intended as enterprise-level.

The statement above is supported by this part of the Pluto FAQ (from here):

Is Pluto an Enterprise Portal?

No, the Pluto project aims to provide a Java Specification compliant Portlet Container. In order to support the container, the Pluto project provides a simple portal, however, this does not provides optional services such as single sign on. If you are looking for an Open Source enterprise Portal implementation, there are several available. Apache Jetspeed is an enterprise portal hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. Sakai and uPortal are both educational portals which utilize Pluto as their container. There are many other open source portals.

Answer 2

Pluto is really not intended to be use as Enterprise Portal. It's useful for development(it's tiny&fast) and you can embed it if you want to develop you own Portal server. But that's a lot of work.

If you want to just "dive in" look at JetSpeed. Or I can recommend you to have a look at Liferay Portal. It's open source as well and it's going with a lot of plugins(portlets) right out-of-the-box. So it gives you a quick impression what is possible to do with it.

Answer 3

Jetspeed 2 uses Pluto as its portlet container, but it is geared towards being a fully functional enterprise application, including its own suite of portlets, SSO, customizable security, themes etc....

If you are looking to get started with portals/portlets, the Jetspeed 2 project is moving along rapidly, and I would suggest joining the mailing lists, as they can be incredibly helpful. Also, download and build the portal from source using the tutorial on the apache portals site and you should be up and running with a custom portal in no time.