Portal Development with Liferay provides an overview of Liferay portal and its features. Liferay is an open source enterprise portal built on Java technologies that provides out of the box tools like wikis, blogs, and document management. It supports standards like AJAX, portlets, and web services. Developers can use the plugin SDK to rapidly develop and deploy portlets and themes or create a custom extension environment. Liferay has been widely adopted by organizations and supports technologies like caching, clustering, and web services to ensure security and performance at scale.

1. Portal Development with Liferay
Presented by Ayan Dave @ COJUG
on 01/13/2009

2. What is Liferay Portal?
• Liferay Portal is world’s leading open
source enterprise portal application
• It is built on top of Java 1.5, Open Source
and Web 2.0 technologies
• Latest stable release is 5.1.2
• JSR-286 compliant – Liferay is in the expert
group of the jsr
2

3. What technical features does it
provide?
Technologies supported and
used Standards
• AJAX
• Apache ServiceMix • AJAX
• ehcache
• Groovy • iCalendar & Microformat
• Hibernate
•
•
ICEfaces
Java J2EE/JEE
• JSR-168 (Portlets 1.0)
• jBPM
• JGroups
• JSR-127 (JSF 1.0)
• jQuery JavaScript Framework
• Lucene • JSR-170 (Content Rep)
• MuleSource ESB
• PHP • JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0)*
• Ruby
• Seam • JSF-314 (JSF 2.0)
• Spring & AOP
•
•
Struts & Tiles
Tapestry
• OpenSearch
• Velocity
3

4. What application features does it
provide?
• Out of box tools – including wiki, blogs,
cms, document management
• Communities and Organization Structure
• Customized personal user pages
• SOA Framework
• Easy one click configuration
4

5. Why use Liferay?
• Need a portal based application
• Need rapid development and / or
prototyping (Well, most projects do !)
• Need collaboration, e-commerce,
internationalization
5

6. “Hmm, Interesting. I need to see
the application now ….”

7. “Wow, this has some good features.
So how do I get my hands dirty with
code …”

8. Using the plugins sdk
• Plugins sdk can be used to create portlets and
themes and deploy them to the Liferay portal
• Easiest and fastest way to start building the
enterprise portal application
• Plugins are hot deployed to tomcat
• Plugins are fully JSR compliant and plugins
developed outside sdk can also be used
• ant -Dportlet.name="hello-world" -Dportlet.display.name="Hello World" create
• ant -Dtheme.name="sample-theme" -Dtheme.display.name="Sample Theme" create
• ant deploy
8

9. Creating an extension environment
• An extension environment can be created from
Liferay portal source
• The ext environment gives us complete control over
the way the system behaves with ways to
reconfigure default Liferay behavior
• release.adave.properties
• app.server.adave.properties
• ant clean start build-ext (takes 7-8 mins)
• ant clean deploy (takes 1-2 mins)
• Configure root.xml on tomcat to connect to database
• Run the app …
9

10. Service Builder
• Liferay has very good service builder
utility. We can specify our domain model in
a service.xml file and run an ant task. The
utility will create Java files, Hibernate files,
and service classes
• Service Builder is a RAD tool, we may
choose to use our own service framework
and layer instead
10

11. “Ahaa, this looks good. So who
has used it?”

12. Examples
• http://www.webjunction.org/
• http://www.worldvision.org/
• http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/products/
portal/stories
12

13. “What about security and
performance?”

14. Security
• Liferay Portal uses industry standard, government-
grade encryption technologies including advanced
algorithms such as DES, MD5 and RSA. Liferay
was benchmarked as among the most secure portal
platforms using LogicLibrary's Logiscan suite.
• Pluggable Authentication
• Email Verification
• Granular Permissioning
• LDAP Authentication
• Session Management
14

15. Performance
• Multi-tier clustering at any combination of multiple tiers
(presentation, service, business logic, and database)
• Advanced Caching
• Page Caching
• Load Balancing
• Session Replication
• Distributed Cache
• Static Content Export
• *Liferay Portal has been deployed to Amazon EC2
which uses virtualization and cloud computing
technologies to scale dynamically to geographically
specific areas of demand.
15

16. “I went to codemash last week and
learned these cool new technologies.
Is Liferay cool enough? (Gotcha
!!!)”

17. Liferay supports Web Services
• JSON
• Hessian
• Burlap
• REST
• RMI
• Spring HTTP
• WSRP
• WebDAV
17

18. Liferay with Groovy, Ruby, PHP
• We can create Groovy, Ruby or PHP
portlets and use them with Liferay
• Liferay plugins repository has several
examples of these
18

19. In the news …
• In 2008 Sun Microsystems and Liferay
teamed up to develop a common web
presentation technology
19

20. Shortcomings
• The ext-impl and ext-service structure – I
would like to use a web – app – domain
project structure
• Need more integration with other enterprise
systems
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21. Q&A
Contact: daveayan@gmail.com