The portal is an experimental project aiming to provide a very simple and hackable portal.
This project can be used as a technical foundation for any application with mashup needs.
The purpose of The Portal is to avoid usage of Java portals based on Portlet specifications that reveal themselves almost always heavy and cumbersome.
Technically, The Portal rely on Play Framework 2, Akka, Scala and MongoDB for the basic portal features. But it doesn't mean that you'll have to write Scala code ;-).
Mashetes are supposed to be JavaScript only applications consuming internal APIs and external REST services using a very powerful HTTP client library. These applications are written using Facebook React library. Mashetes can communicate with each other and can be contacted from outside throught an Event Bus allowing server side push, unicasting, broadcasting, filtering, etc ... You can also keep it simple by only integrating iframes (it seems that this is a common use case). In that case, The portal provide a very simple SSO mechanisme to propage user identity to the external resources.
Code of The Portal is available at : https://github.com/mathieuancelin/portal
A demo instance is available on Heroku
To run it, in dev mode, you need to start a MongoDB instance.
You also need to run the npm build.
$ npm install
$ npm run watchBefore building the production distribution, you will need to build the minified javascript
$ npm install
$ npm run build