Like Drupal or Joomla CMS/portal solutions in the PHP world we have few good open source java solutions. Liferay is one of them.
This product was chosen by my previous employers client( a large online media publishing house of USA). This is when I got a chance to play around with liferay for around 1 year.
This client wanted to upgrade their media sites to latest technology but with minimum costs and the so called web2.0. Liferay was evaluated and given a choice by our onsite/offshore Archtects.
"Brian Chan, Chief Software Architect and founder, began development on Liferay Portal in 2000 to provide nonprofit organizations with an open source solution to facilitate collaboration on the Internet. He has since steered Liferay to become a leader in innovative open source enterprise solutions. With a strong foundation in software architecture and economics, Brian has solidified open source as a low-cost, high performance solution for the enterprise. His expertise in portal architecture and design has garnered him a seat on the JSR-286 portlet specification committee "
What liferay has is - a well organized and fusion of the best java/open source technologies.
Most organizations end up reinventing the wheel- doing a portal after spending time in evaluating, building and testing different open source technologies. For example web/service/persistence tiers, RSS feed, blogs, theme design, etc would need enough effort . A complete lifecycle is required to get things going. If they are not well organized they end up with maintenance nightmares or issues when trying to extend it features..
The technicalities:
You name a buzzword in Java/J2ee (No EJB please) and they have it
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/products/portal/techspecs
To list a few java buzzwords what Liferay Portal has:
Web Services,
REST, WebDAV
Architecture:
SSO(CAS), ESB support, modular, pluggable
Performance and scalability:
Clustering, Caching (ehcache), page/portlet caching.
Supported standards:
AJAX, JSR-168/286(for portlets)
Uses best of the breed open source technologies
To name a few - jquery, lucene, spring, hibernate, struts, velocity, ehcache
SOA, SSO, Web2.0 features - wiki, blog
Most databases supported.(Persistence tier uses hibernate)
Content Management:
Document Library - JSR-170
Versioning/workflow/webdav/image gallery,etc.
SEO/Site map, rich text editors, friendly urls
Themes and layout:
jQuery standardized
hot deployable
velocity based.
A video to create a journal article on a site so easily is
here
A few numbers to show its popularity:
Google returns
363,000 results for "Liferay portal" (exact search including quotes)
1,710,000 for liferay
Started in 2000 9th year of development.
Liferay Community forums:
# of Categories: 41
# of Posts: 77,263
# of Participants: 8,524
Wiki:
300+ articles
Pluses
- This open source product is being used by many users. Hence well tested and best practises incorporated. Also there is a large active community support.
- Most importantly by embracing an open source product like liferay, it would keep the organisation up to date with latest technologies. It is just a matter of upgrading to never version.
- Also most common problems like single sign on, RSS, indexing/searching, etc are already solved by applying the best practises. With such a readily available integrated technology stack, migrating to newer technologies becomes much more easier.
The worries:
- As it is bundled with lots of technologies, it becomes heavy weight. But with liferay's a modular architecture, this can be customized and hence minimized.
- Like any new technology, a steeper learning curve is involved. Once a transition happens it should be worth the investment of time and money.
- Customizing liferay to the organizational needs would take time as we need to match the companies infrastructure to liferay's architecture.Eg: The database schema is designed for liferay. How do we customize it? This is where you got to burn your midnight oil...
- Liferay has virtual hosting support. But to integrate with the existing infrastructure, it would take enough time and research.
- "Its a black box with lot of complex things going in it. It may go out of control as we dont know what is happening inside.. " As it is opensource it is transparent and you are free to fix it for yourself.
Some good links:
Videos :
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/documentation/5_1
An issue tracking system : issues.liferay.com
