Portofino 5.3 released

[Alessio Stalla]

Hi everyone,

I'm proud to announce the release of Portofino 5.3! This is a feature release focused on deploying applications in a microservice architecture. A guide for upgrading from a previous version of Portofino 5.x is in our wiki.

In particular, in addition to the usual WAR and Docker deployment options – that may or may not include the GUI – we now have the possibility to develop and launch a Portofino service as a Spring Boot application. In this scenario, no GUI is included, you don't need Docker or an application server – everything is contained in a single JAR file, so you only need Java to be installed.

Though there's no documentation yet on microservices deployments with Portofino, there's a Maven archetype you can use to create a new application, as well as a couple of sample microservices (for the email and Quartz scheduler subsystems) that you can study in the Portofino source code.

As part of this effort, we've also made security with Shiro completely optional. You can run your application with no authentication/authorization, for example if you deploy it behind a microservices gateway; or, you can implement your own security with other tools (e.g. Spring Security).

Other notable additions and improvements include:

• Multitenancy support in Hibernate.
• Liquibase updated to version 4, minor library updates to fix vulnerabilities.
• The URL to trigger the mail sender changed from /actions/mail-sender-run to /portofino-send-mail and the HTTP method changed from GET to POST.
• Mail sender action can be disabled with mail.sender.action.enabled=false.
• Ensured that Java-only microservices without Groovy are possible. However, you'll lose hot-reload capability for modified actions.
  
• Optimized selection providers based on foreign keys on save.
• Reduce assumptions on persistent entities by CRUD actions allowing more possibilities for custom entities.
• Fixed authentication/authorization endpoint (/:auth). This makes life easier for clients but it's been implemented in a backwards-compatible way so that existing clients should not change.

You can download Portofino 5.2 binaries, API documentation, and source packages from SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/portofino/files/manydesigns-portofino.

Library dependencies to build Portofino applications are available on Maven Central and on npm for the Angular UI. Also, a Docker image for the standalone Upstairs application to manage a Portofino instance is available on Docker Hub.

Finally, on the GitHub wiki you can find:

• a Getting Started page for users that are new to Portofino

• a growing collection of video tutorials

• the guide for upgrading from a previous version of Portofino 5.x

• a document detailing all the changes from Portofino 4 to Portofino 5.0 and some migration instructions from Portofino 4.

Sincerely,

Alessio