News

eXo Platform Advances 'UXP as a Service' for Java Devs

• By John K. Waters
• February 6, 2012

eXo, the French company best known for its GateIn-based enterprise Java portal, just released version 3.5 of its flagship eXo Platform, which the company bills as the first integrated environment for building modern Java apps with such features as content management, collaboration, social intranet capabilities and support for mobile app development.

The eXo Platform comes with a Web-based IDE, a portal framework, collaboration tools, an enterprise content management system, a knowledge management solution and a set of enterprise social networking capabilities. The core platform is architected on the GateIn portal framework, an open source project developed jointly by JBoss and eXo. The company describes it as "a cloud-ready, multi-tenant platform that provides tools for building cloud- and data-center-based social intranets, customer extranets, and transaction-oriented Web sites."

This release of the eXo Platform adds support for native iPhone, iPad and Android apps, and multi-tenancy deployments that includes the option to host isolated portals on a single automatically scalable instance of the platform. According to the company, it also comes with a simpler interface, improved collaboration and content management tools, better Java Content Repository (JCR) performance and an embeddable IDE, among other features.

Also, the Web site samples included with eXo Platform have been expanded in version 3.5, the company says, "to better illustrate how developers can take advantage of many of the new features of eXo Platform 3.5 -- from UI customization to the inclusion of rich content and improved site navigation."

This release also adds the eXo Platform Gadget Pack, which includes 15 new gadgets designed to provide easy access to a variety of collaboration, development, monitoring and other eXo Platform services.

The company has begun to describe itself as "the user experience (UPX) platform-as-a-service company." Think UXP as a service, or a UXPaaS. The UXP is "the emerging implementation of next-generation portal services," the company says. Unlike traditional portal services, however, a UXP platform offers "an integrated collection of technologies that speed the creation of portals built around content, collaboration capabilities, social streams and services, mobile access, and more."

"We built the first true UXPaaS," said Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo's founder and CEO, in a statement. "Imagine company ABC wanting to integrate their custom-built inventory application in an enterprise portal with social networking and document management capabilities, and then deliver that as a private cloud service to all their customers. eXo Platform 3.5 enables them to do just that -- and to do it very efficiently."

Last August, eXo added VMware's then new Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to a growing list of PaaS systems supported by its Cloud IDE development tool. The eXo Cloud IDE -- not to be confused with the eXo Platform -- is a cloud-based integrated development environment that provides developers with a multi-tenant, hosted space designed for the collaborative building of apps based on Java, Groovy, Spring, PHP, Ruby and HTML, among others.