Liferay
Liferay Web Site
Liferay was developed out of the lack of a lower end
portal solution. Of all the portals reviewed, Liferay
has the best Web site and accompanying documentation.
Check out the FAQ). The result is a pretty deep
solution that handles not just the basic users and portlet
drawing, but also has a full administrative interface,
documented support for all of the major databases, documented
support for the main J2EE application servers (JBoss/Jetty,
JBoss/TomCat, Oracle AS, Pramati, WebLogic, Orion, and more
coming soon, see site for versions and latest details) and
single sign-on capabilities. Did I mention it also supports
multiple languages?
Liferay is a true J2EE application, relying on numerous
patterns, EJBs and built on top of the Struts platform. Many J2EE developers are
familiar with Struts, making this a good call for an underlying
framework. An XML-based registry is also used to store portlets.
A number of portlets are included, including a guestbook, a
calendar, a mapping utility using Expedia, news, polls, a
document library, live stock information and more (including
Bible verses). It's a great start for anyone launching a portal
project. I was unable to determine what the API is for
developing portlets, it looks like EJBs are used for this. In
addition to the included portlets, Apache Lucene is used to enable document searching.
XML is supported and it looks like Web services.
Liferay is clearly a good option, especially for anyone who is
familiar with Struts. Of course because Liferay is a complete
application, it will work well for many companies out of the
box. The only concern I would have would be how easy or
difficult it is to develop portlets.
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