I have been messing around with Liferay community edition for a few weeks now. Initially writing simple ‘hello world’ portlets and then moving on to inter-portlet communication, blending of data, utilising Liferay’s localisation, preference, help capabilities.
What it offers ‘out of the box’ is great, a full CMS (content management system) which doubles as a portal. It includes, organisations, roles, users, theming and a number of authorisation mechanisms such as oauth. To customise it and add to it, writing portlets is a good place to start.
The portlet spec (JSR 286 http://developers.sun.com/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/) is really good in theory, in practice it takes a little more work, but is a good idea overall. Writing jsp’s seems a little old school in today’s world, in fact Java in general is beginning to feel a little out of date.
So I understand that soon Liferay will support scripting languages to write portlets, this will be a fantastic addition and hopefully open up the platform to a plethora of new developers. A couple of issues I ran into with portlets incase you were wondering:
– Order of loading, if portlets pass info around with session then the order they load is important, explicit control is not great for this via config etc.
– Compatibility with some modern front end UI components, had some problems with datagrids with some javascript libs.
– Eclipse IDE SDK is not good, the IDE crashes frequently with the SDK installed and does not handle importing of other peoples projects well.
I stress to add that even with the above problems, I still really like Liferay!
