Revisiting the Liferay Portal

Last June I was contacted by an acquisitions editor with Manning Publications and asked if I would be interested in reviewing an outline for a book proposal on portlets. Books on portlets are few and far between and I was more than happy to take a look at the proposal. Not only did I get a complimentary ebook of my choice from Manning, but I was asked again last week to do a review, this time of the initial chapters of the book.

Feeling as I do, that the portlet technology is far from reaching the level of acceptance that was hoped for, I remain skeptical that this book will be a best seller. I am grateful to the author, though, for all the work he has obviously had to do to create these first four chapters. If the book makes it to press, it will already be outdated, but I would not hesitate to pay the $50+ price that will probably be charged. I got lost on the 3rd and 4th chapters because I've not been exposed to the Spring Portlet MVC framework. I'm not sure I will ever be using Spring and didn't want to spend the time downloading yet another new tool. But I got enough good stuff out of the first 2 chapters that the book would be well worth the price.

Anything that I can find in printed form about portlets is valuable in building up my knowledge and understanding. I found the first 2 chapters to be a good summary and review of the portlet architecture. In several areas there were sections that lit up the proverbial light bulb. For example, I could certainly relate my experiences to the section on "Choosing a Portal Server." It helped me realize part of the reason why learning to develop portlets has been such a struggle. There is no one who understands why a portal is needed in our environment. Without knowing the requirements it's been hard to have a direction and purpose for struggling down this path.

What I will be most grateful to the author (Ashish Sarin) for is the instructions and explanations he provided for downloading and installing the Liferay portal and the Eclipse IDE. Because I had just finished a two-week effort to install WebLogic Server 10.3, WebLogic Portal 10.3 and WebLogic Workshop on a Linux virtual machine I had the basis for contrasting something lightweight and simple with something that was an installation and configuration nightmare. If I had been able to have Sarin's manuscript in hand a year and a half ago when I started this whole portlet thing, I might have been a much happier developer.

Why did I want to fight with WebLogic in the first place? Well, we have needed some way to verify that when we develop portlets they are JSR 168 compliant. We use the NetBeans IDE with portlet plug-ins to develop the portlets and Sun's Open Portal Portlet Container to deploy them. Early on I had tried using WebSynergy (which became Web Space Server) but gave up in frustration. I know that it is built on top of Liferay and some would say that it is the same thing as Liferay, now that the 2 Open Source projects were combined. But I did not find it at all easy to understand, maybe because I didn't realize at the time how closely tied it was to Liferay. I was always trying to find documentation by going to the Sun forums and wikis. I hadn't gotten involved with the Liferay community.

Sarin's book, complete with illustrations and step-by-step instructions, gave me the courage to give Liferay and Eclipse another try. I was blown away at how easy it was to get up and running and to deploy the first JSR-168 test portlet. After the hours spent with WebLogic I still did not know how to do the simple task of deploying a JSR-168 portlet. That was the reason in the first place that I went to the trouble of installing it. Although I finally did get a JSR-168 portlet installed on WebLogic, I dread ever having to do it again. To give you an idea of the nightmare look at the forum thread.

We should be able to use Liferay as our JSR-168 portlet testbed. It's quite simple to upload and install a portlet application. And there's so much more out-of-the-box functionality that can be added. Asking management to take a look at the portlets we deployed on Portlet Container was a bit embarrassing because of the barebones interface. I hope to have time to build up some nice looking pages and capabilities on Liferay.