Portofino 4.1 released!

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Alessio Stalla

Finally, it's here!

We are really happy to announce that Portofino 4.1 has been released today! To all our beloved users, thanks for your patience! We hope Portofino 4.1 will serve your needs well.

Ok, but... what's new? With respect to the beta 6, our last public release, there are almost no new features. However, there have been many technology upgrades - particularly to Bootstrap 3 and Groovy 2.3. And bug fixes and small improvements, of course!

Bootstrap 3 is the latest incarnation of Twitter's HTML5 framework for beautiful, responsive web pages. Portofino 4.1 beta was based on the now outdated Bootstrap 2. By using Bootstrap 3, Portofino apps look familiar and modern out of the box, and are easily themed and tweaked by tapping into the huge amount of resources available for Bootstrap.

As the only proper new feature, we added a couple of page types, to help new users get started with custom pages based on a single Elements form; they can be used, e.g., to show the results of a query as a table, to make a simple edit form, etc.

So, if you are already using Portofino 4.1.beta6, why the heck are you still here reading this post? Go update to 4.1! ;) The experience should be rather painless. If you have custom .jsp pages in your application that make use of Bootstrap 2 classes, of course you'll have to update them to Bootstrap 3, but that's mostly a search-and-replace job (look here: http://getbootstrap.com/migration).

To finalize the release, we ultimately decided to leave a few things out of 4.1; for example, a more flexible and pluggable blob manager. We'd like to hear from you what you'd like to be included in the next release!

A recap

For those who didn't follow the development of Portofino 4.1 closely, here's a recap of the new stuff you can find in this release:

Twitter Bootstrap 3 for beautiful, responsive HTML5 applications that gracefully adapt to different screen sizes out of the box
Authentication, authorization and user management built in and easily adaptable to your needs: LDAP, OpenID, Single Sign-On, self-registration, remember me... you name it!
Modularity: everyone can customize Portofino by writing new modules with a simple API or removing unneeded functionality
Standards-based yet agile: a Portofino application has the structure of a typical Java web app, but you can also develop it live as if it were PHP. Neat!
Modern technology stack: Groovy, Java 6+, Servlet API 3.x, Maven, ...
And much more!

Go get it!

Download Portofino 4.1 from SourceForge and have fun! If you have issues or suggestions, please come to our community forums.