Liferay

Liferay Portal is a free and open source enterprise portal project written in Java and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License^[2] and optional commercial license.^[1] The Liferay project additionally supports Liferay Social Office, Liferay Sync, Liferay AlloyUI, Liferay enterprise Connectivity Apps and the Liferay Marketplace. It is primarily used to power corporate intranets and extranets.^[3]

Liferay Portal is a web platform with features commonly required for the development of websites and portals. Liferay includes a built-in web content management system allowing users to build websites and portals as an assembly of themes, pages, portlets/gadgets and a common navigation.^[4] Liferay is sometimes described as a content management framework or a web application framework. Liferay's support for plugins extends into multiple programming languages, including support for PHP and Ruby portlets.^[5]

Although Liferay offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Liferay Portal is Java-based and runs on any computing platform capable of running the Java Runtime Environment and an application server. Liferay is available bundled with a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat.^[6]

History

Liferay, Inc., is a professional open-source company that provides free documentation and paid professional service to users of its software. Mainly focused on enterprise portal technology, the company has its headquarters in Diamond Bar, California, United States.

Liferay Portal was created in 2000 by chief software architect Brian Chan to provide an enterprise portal solution for non-profit organizations.^[7] In 2004, the company was incorporated under the name Liferay, Inc. and formalized its Germany subsidiary Liferay GmbH. In 2007, the company opened new Asian headquarters in Dalian, China, and the Spanish subsidiary Liferay SL. In March 2009, the company opened a new office in Bangalore, India.

The company's enterprise portal product has been acknowledged by several notable organizations. It was recognized by EContent magazine in its "EContent 100" list of industry leaders^[8][9] and in 2007, InfoWorld named it a "Technology of the Year".^[10] In July 2007, it announced a partnership with ICEsoft Technologies, provider of the ICEfaces library, for developing Ajax technology for its enterprise portal software.^[11] In January 2008, the company hired the lead engineer for jQuery UI, to exclusively work full-time on the JavaScript library.^[12] Gartner recognized Liferay as visionary leader in the Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012.^[3][13]

Sun Microsystems and Liferay signed a technology-sharing agreement during May 2008.^[14] Sun Microsystems rebranded the offering GlassFish Web Space Server. ZDNet further describes the relationship in the May 2008 article Sun and Liferay launch web-presentation platform.^[15] In 2010 Sun was acquired by Oracle^[16] and the GlassFish Web Space Server was not included their portal roadmap, with all prospects turned over to Liferay, Inc.

Liferay 6.1 was released in January 2012 and saw several improvements and new functionality including an improved document library, dynamic data lists and an app store.^[17]

In April 2013, Liferay partnered with TIBCO Software to offer a series of Liferay enterprise Connectivity Adapters (eC Adapters) that use TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks with the intention of easing integration of Liferay Portal with multiple systems.^[18]

Products

Liferay Portal is a JSR-286 and enterprise portal which includes a suite of applications (e.g., Content Management System, blogs, instant messaging, message boards, etc.).^[19]

It is distributed in two different editions:^[20]

• Liferay Portal Community Edition — A version with the latest features and support through the active community.
• Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition — A commercial offering that includes services including updates and full support. This release goes through additional quality assurance cycles and is usually available around 1 or 2 months after the Community Edition and comes under a subscription.^[21]

Liferay also provides a collaboration suite based on the Liferay platform:

• Liferay Social Office — A social collaboration suite for enterprises.

Additional Liferay products and projects include:

• Liferay Sync — Enables Liferay Portal users to publish and access documents and files from multiple environments, including Windows and Mac OS desktops, and iOS and Android-based mobile platforms.
• AlloyUI — A UI framework for building web applications.
• Liferay Faces — An umbrella project that provides support for the JavaServer Faces (JSF) standard within Liferay Portal.
• Liferay IDE — Set of Eclipse plugins for development with the Liferay Portal platform.
• Liferay Marketplace — Liferay's public apps repository.

^[22]

Core portlets

Liferay comes with certain portlets preinstalled.^[23] These comprise the core functionality of the portal system. They include:

• Alerts and Announcements
• Alfresco, Documentum, and other document library integration
• Asset Publishing
• Blogs and blog aggregation
• Breadcrumbs
• Calendar
• Chat
• Document and Image management
• Document Library Manager, Recent Documents
• Knowledge Base
• LDAP Integration
• Mail
• Message Boards
• Nested Portlets
• Page Ratings & Flags
• Polls
• Site Map
• Site Navigation
• Social Equity
• Software Catalog
• Tags and Categories
• Themes, supporting Velocity and FreeMarker markup
• User Directory
• Web Content
• Web Form Builder
• WebDAV Integration
• Website Tool
• Wiki (supports Creole as well as MediaWiki syntax)

Version release

See also

• JSR-286
• List of enterprise portal vendors

References

Further reading

External links

• Official website
• Gasperson, Tina (September 13, 2006). "Goodwill is good with open source portal Liferay". Linux.com. 
• Heck, Mike (May 5, 2006). "Jboss and Liferay provide open portals to SOA". InfoWorld.