SharePoint versus Web Space Server

I've had some time now to kick the tires on Sun's GlassFish Web Space Server 10.0 that was released last month. One of the things that strikes me is how much it seems to want to imitate the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. But maybe that's because of the time I had been spending working with MOSS. Web Space Server came out of Project WebSynergy. When I played around with WebSynergy last fall I was concentrating on portlets and WSRP and if it had MOSS-like features, I wasn't paying much attention to that part of it. It was difficult enough just to get it to work.

I appreciate that Web Space Server has better documentation. I think it has finally fully incorporated Liferay and can take advantage of the community knowledge from that product. There is a lot of documentation about the social networking, content management and workflow features, which is interesting from the standpoint of a comparision to SharePoint. But the focus of my project is supposed to be building portlets that will work on any portal. Once again, as I try to actually build and deploy portlets with GIS usability I continue to encounter problems.

We have 2 instances of Web Space Server 10.0 that are being evaluated. I installed webspace-10-fcs-gfv2-windows.zip on Windows Vista on my laptop. For an evaluation copy visible to the group we installed webspace-gfv2-sunos-x86.zip on Sun Solaris 10 on a virtual machine. On the Windows Vista Web Space Server I was able to deploy the WAR file containing the 4 GIS portlets that I had developed earlier in the year with NetBeans 6.5. But I can't seem to get the WAR file to deploy on the Sun Solaris instance. Still waiting for a response from the users@webspace.dev.java.net mailgroup.

There must be some part of the Solaris installation that we've done incorrectly--I'm thinking maybe something to do with file/folder permissions. That's the instance where I have an outstanding question from a week ago when we first installed it and the User Sample Login portlet that's supposed to be on the Welcome screen was not working. It wasn't working when I first installed the Windows Vista instance but I got a response right away from the mailgroup on that one. It was just a matter of rebooting the server. But that didn't work on the Sun Solaris instance. There were error messages, too, when the Windows Vista one didn't work but there have been no error messages when the Solaris version fails to deploy the portlets. It's like the deployment process is just not finishing.

If we can get no response from the forum about why we can't deploy to the Solaris version I'm not sure what the next step will be--maybe talk again to the sys admin who installed it and see if we need to reinstall. Meanwhile, what I now need to do is set up NetBeans to use the Web Space Server on my laptop and beef up a couple of portlets I built awhile ago that use Open Layers. Portlets sure do look a lot better on Web Space Server than they do on Portlet Container.