HomePortals 3 Portal Framework

Well, after several years of going back and forth with this project, I finally decided to share it with everyone and release my little baby as an open source project. HomePortals is a framework or platform for creating and running portals in ColdFusion. Most of the features in HomePortals focus around modularity, reusability of visual components, and personalization.

Besides providing the framework, conventions and APIs for creating the sites, HomePortals also acts as a 'runtime' or 'rendering' engine. All pages in a HomePortals application are actually XML documents that describe the elements and modules to display as well as their layout and arrangement. The HomePortals engine is responsible for reading, parsing and rendering the actual pages based on the specifications of the given XML documents. This is a little bit like MXML in Flex, but in ColdFusion.

I have succesfully tested HomePortals in ColdFusion MX 7, ColdFusion 8 and Railo 2. I have not yet had the chance to try it out in BlueDragon.

I created a small site for this project, where you can download the framework, a sample application and find some documentation. The URL for the site is http://www.homeportals.net

HomePortals has an LGPL license, which means that the library itself has to remain open source and any changes have to be shared, but it can also be used by non open source applications as an external library or component of the application.

If someone wants to try HomePortals out I'd really like to hear some feedback.

Another related project I will be releasing soon is ColdBricks... but I'll talk about that some other time :)