About SPP

The Subject Portals Project had its origins within JISC's Resource Discovery Network (RDN). It has since undergone a re-organisation and a re-launch as [http://www.intute.ac.uk/ Intute], but it was the umbrella organisation for the eight or so UK subject hubs (e.g. SOSIG, and BIOME, now both part of Intute). These subject hubs had often grown out of projects to be important cornerstones of the UK's Higher Education information environment.

At the time, while the RDN sought to provide a single coherent branding for the disparate collection of hubs, the SPP drew together hub developers and sought to develop a single software platform for those hubs. The work it undertook was based upon Apache's Jetspeed Open Source Portal platform ([http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-1/ version 1]) and pre-dated the [http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 JSR 168] and [http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 WSRP] portlet standards. It entailed a z39.50 cross-searching portlet, and an RSS portlet amongst other things, and also interoperated with Athens, the UK Higher Education authentication and authorisation service. This work finished in 2004. More about the earlier phases of SPP can be found from ["Archive"]. In the end, this Java-based portal route was not opted for by the re-launched Intute.

This SPP Portlets site hosts the work done under the final phase of the project. This work was funded by JISC during 2006/2007 and aimed to make the Open Source code more usefully available to the community at large.