I am starting up a portal project based on open-source(low-cost) stuff. While LifeRay seems to be better for us to find a hosting provider(works on Tomcat), JBoss Portal is well-known among open-source community for its "JBoss" name and JBoss has other J2EE services (Hibernate and EJB) under its management.
Please share me your opinions on these two portal frameworks.
Thanks!
Cameron Wallace McKenzie
,
author and cow tipper
staff
Thanks a lot, Kameron, for your warm reply... I've scoped down into LifeRay and JBoss Portal. I am having a hard time in deciding which one to use. One thing that I heard is that hosting service is one of the factors in choosing a framework also. AFAIK, JBoss Portal hosting services are more expensive than LifeRay.
How about for JetSpeed in terms of hosting service?
If you are fixed the scope and want to choose from jboss/liferay and hosting costs is an important a factor for you then you should go with liferay liferay provide tens of out of the box portlet which almost make it enough for collaborative tasks. in case that you still have room for other portal then i should tell you to look at two other portal Exo , Stringbeans . Exo is very powerful in term of infrastructures and compliance with standards while Stringbeans is light/easy to manage and very customizeable.
Masoud, You are right. The most concerned factor for me right now is the hosting cost. I also like the fact that LifeRay comes with a bunch of portlets that I can just use. How do you think about customizing the out-of-the-box portlets coming with LifeRay?
Liferay has tens of out of the box portlet from forum to shopping cart to what ever you need in a general purpose web portal. what kind of customization you want to apply on those portlets if you want to change them in term of functionality then you will have some rela jobs to do , but if you want just configure the portal to act according your needs then it will be an easy job because you should just define where and for whom a portlet should appear and who has access to what section of portal. all are declared using roles and rules :-) .
Liferay has a big user community which you can resolve your problem with them int the forums , something that i think exo does not has.
It seems like I should choose LifeRay for now. And I should develop the custom portlets under JSR-168 spec so that I can easily deploy them on other portal frameworks if I want to.
Thanks a lot, Masoud. Have you had any experience with JBoss portal as well? If you have, could you kindly share us too?
about jboss portal , i just deploy and test it to look at its features. Jboss portal and Exo both of them are powerfull in term of infrastractures. specially exo portal. but about portlet development i can have a suggestion for you , take a look a Sun java Studio creator for fastest way to create data driven portlets using jsf and jsr-168 .
Originally posted by Masoud Kalali: but about portlet development i can have a suggestion for you , take a look a Sun java Studio creator for fastest way to create data driven portlets using jsf and jsr-168 .
Ouch! While I've got pretty much experience with JBuiler and Eclipse, I've never tried Sun's Java Studio before. Do you mean that there is some kind of wizard in Sun Java Studio to create data-driven portlets? Could you elaborate your meaning on data-driven portlets as well?
In recent years Sun has put a huge effort on netbeans and all its development tools like java studio enterprise (which is now open source and a part of neteabsn.
java studio creator also is a part of netbeans and i should tell you that in next few weeks you will see its develope preview out.
Studio creator is a Delphi like development environment that allows you create web application in a RAD manner. you drag and drop a table on your form and it gives you a data grid...... one feature of Creator is that it allows you ability to develop deploy and test jsr-168 based portlets .it uses jsf and rowset to achieve its goal.
you should try it to understand what does i mean , it make data driven development very easy for web developers. a delphi for java web developers.