Pretty neat stuff, I haven’t spent much time on portlets, but I’m quite sure this is the first open source portlet runner I have come across, I am looking forward to evaluate this product.

Open source Portlet-compliant Liferay 3.5 has been released, this new version adding hot deployable themes, portlet instancing (portlets appearing more than once on a page), built in support for Sun JSF and MyFaces, friendly URLs, and more.

Liferay is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168). Many portlets are bundled with the portal (Mail, Document Library, Calendar, Message Boards, to name a few). Liferay is appserver and database agnostic, and was originally designed to support ASP’s by having one server/db instance serve multiple independent domains. Liferay integrates with Spring, and has been around for a while and has a number of notable real customer deployments.

Jing Xue also blogged posted his first impressions.

* Liferay open source portal 3.5 released

ZDNet UK is reporting that the next major release of Mozilla Firefox has been delayed and will now be known as Firefox 1.5 rather than 1.1. The upgrade is now set for a September release.

The Firefox Roadmap was updated on Wednesday by lead engineer Ben Goodger. It changed the plans from calling for an increasingly unrealistic 1.1 release this month to a 1.5 release in September. Firefox 1.5 Beta is now set for an August launch.

Read the full story here:
* MozillaZine | Mozilla Firefox 1.1 Delayed, Renamed to 1.5

darkonc writes “The CBC has notes and an interview with Dane Rasmus Nielsen who decided to reduce the confusion between ‘free as in speech’ and ‘free as in beer’ by making a beer free — in speech. The result is Vores Øl, an open source beer. The CBC site includes the recipe for the beer which is made with Guarana beans, and gives it a bit of a caffeine-like hit. The danish site downloads include the label for the beer (which is also Open Source).”

* Slashdot | Free Beer That’s Free as in Speech

The WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force is trying to redeem the reputation of JavaScript, by encouraging developers to write ‘Unobtrusive scripts’ that complement the existing solution, and not the old school way where the JavaScripts are required to use the full features of a website. My personal opinion on this is that it’s about time JavaScript got it’s good name cleansed — It’s a great language, too often mistreated by bad coding styles, and lack of conceptual understanding of JavaScript and it’s purpose.

Excerpt: At the moment JavaScript suffers from outdated, uninformed, and inaccessible development methods which preclude it, and therefore web development in general, from attaining its full potential.

The WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force proposes to solve this problem by the adoption of unobtrusive DOM scripting, a way of thinking based on modern, standards-compliant, accessible web development best practices.

While both front end and back end developers will profit from this change of perspective, the most important benefits will accrue to our end users, whether they use the latest and greatest desktop browser, assitive programs like screen readers, or other devices.

Read the full WaSP JavaScript Manifesto here:
* WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force » JavaScript Manifesto

yellowTAB’s Zeta 1.0 is based on the legendary BeOS from Be Inc. BeOS was really cool for it’s time when it first came out, however as we all know companies started focusing seriously on Windows as the main Corporate Desktop systems, which resulted in it’s demise. Be Inc. was acquired by Palm, Inc. in 2001, and later the source was open-sourced in some form (please refer to other sources for more precise history of BeOS).

Provataki writes “OSNews’ Thom Holwerda posted the first in-depth review of the recently released Zeta 1.0. He goes over installation, impressions, usage, application and hardware support, BFS queries and concludes that yellowTAB’s Zeta is the deserving future of BeOS; plus, it’s the only one based on the original source code by Be, Inc.”

* Slashdot | yellowTAB’s Zeta 1.0 Reviewed