Liferay Portal Question

[Brett Lewinski]

Hello -

My team was recently asked to evaluate Liferay and JBoss as portal solutions for a client; the solution calls for some highly customizable aspects to the solution (custom auth; custom ACL & changing portlet creation /editing flow to name a few). We also had the constraint of needing to run the solution an a pre-existing JBoss App Server with an Oracle db. We encountered a great deal of difficulty installing Liferay onto our existing JBoss server and connecting the installation to Oracle. After our analysis we determined that many of the things we would need to do would be difficult using Liferay. So we are leaning towards using JBoss at this point. For the record I am not bashing Liferay; I am a big believer in the best tool for the task at hand.

It almost seems like Liferay is more for the Admins who want to stand up a portal slap a new coat of paint on it; tweak a few settings and have a portal as opposed to the developer who wants to get under the hood and work on the wiring. While this may be fine in some instances; in our particular case it may not work. In fact we will most likely use Liferay for another client who doesn't have so many custom requirements.

Anyhow I am wondering how come Liferay is so tightly bundled to the App Server and are there any plans to loose the tethering it has to the App Server? Also is Liferay intended to have it's internals modified and in some cases modified rather radically; it seems in our opinion this is not their intent.

Thanks for any information!
Brett

[Jonas X. Yuan]

Hi Brett,

In brief, Liferay portal uses Open Standards and the latest technologies which ease the pain of integration.

You can use one of the following options for Servlet containers and full Java EE application servers to run Liferay Portal:
• Geronimo + Tomcat
• Glassfish 3
• Glassfish 2 for AIX
• Glassfish 2 for Linux
• Glassfish 2 for OSX
• Glassfish 2 for Solaris
• Glassfish 2 for Solaris (x86)
• Glassfish 2 for Windows
• JBoss + Tomcat 4.2
• JBoss + Tomcat 5.0
• Jetty
• JOnAS + Jetty
• JOnAS + Tomcat
• Resin
• Tomcat 5.5 and 6.0
• Borland ES 6.5
• JRun 4 Updater 3
• Oracle AS 10
• Orion 2.0
• Pramati 5.0
• RexIP 2.5
• SUN JSAS 9.1
• WebLogic 8.1 SP4, 9.2, 10
• WebSphere 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0
Databases that Liferay portal can run on include, but not limited:
• Apache Derby
• IBM DB2
• Firebird
• Hypersonic
• Informix
• InterBase
• JDataStore
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgresSQL
• SAP
• SQL Server
• Sybase
Operating systems that Liferay portal can run on include:
• LINUX (Debian, RedHat, SUSE, Ubuntu, and so on)
• UNIX (AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, OS X, Solaris, and so on)
• WINDOWS
• MAC OS X

And successful stories:

http://www.liferay.com/

http://www.knovel.com/

http://www.sesamestreet.org/

http://www.sesameworkshop.org/

etc.

- Jonas Yuan

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

as opposed to the developer who wants to get under the hood and work on the wiring

As a developer with a bit of experience with LifeRay, I can attest to the fact that getting under the hood of Liferay is indeed possible, and almost fun.

-Cameron McKenzie