Introduction to Liferay Portal

Liferay is Portlet technology which follows the JSR 168 and JSR 286 Compliants.

Liferay is very good open source for portlet technology have very good working group and community.

Portlet technology is similar to servlet technology but portlet is small part of dynamic content in web page.

In normal web application when we send request then server serve the response to the client or browser. Here entire page will be served by one response.

Coming to portlet technology in one web page there may be many portlets and each portlet have its own request and response.

Each portlet can send request and get the response from server then the response belongs to only the portlet which send the request.

We can say portlet is small fragment of dynamic content in the page. Page is aggregation of multiple fragments of dynamic content and each dynamic fragment is managed by one portlet in the web page.

In one page we can accommodate multiple portlet and each portlet is responsible for generate dynamic content for page. Multiple portlet together generate the dynamic content and all the portlet dynamic content aggregation will be generated as one web page.


Liferay

Liferay is implemented portlet technology and it exposed as opens source.

Liferay portlet technology  follows the JSR 168and JSR 286 Compliant which was given by java community people. Portlet technology should follow the JSR portlet specification.

Like that liferay have implemented portlet specification and give to us as open source. Anybody can get source code and they can customize and add new features to Liferay portal.

Liferay portal consist set of portlets and ready to build web application and we can also develop new portlet application using liferay. Liferay have its own frame work and standards to add new feature and customize existed portal.

Liferay have given two kinds of portal

  1. Liferay Enterprise Edition
  2. Liferay Community Edition


Liferay Enterprise Edition:

Liferay Enter Price Edition is paid portal which have enterprise license from liferay Inc. Liferay Enter Price Edition  have support from Liferay Inc and it’s have more benefits than Liferay Community Edition version.

Liferay Community Edition

Liferay Community Edition is available to public and anybody can get source code and then can add or customize. Very good working group and community people working for this. We can also contribute our effort to liferay community.

The following is Difference between CE and EE


Major Liferay Versions:


Liferay 6.2.x CE&EE, Liferay 6.1.x CE&EE, Liferay 6.0.x CE&EE and Liferay 5.2.x CE&EE


Features of Liferay
  • Liferay is ready to use web application
  • Liferay have many portlet to full fill dynamic web application functionality
  • Very Good Enterprise Web Content Management System
  • Sites, Organization and User Groups
  • Social Network Portlet
  • Document Library Management
  • Collaboration (Blogs, Wikis and Forums)
  •  Service Oriented Architecture Support.
  • Dynamic Look and Feel from Themes
  • Changing page layouts
  • Good Portal Administration User Interface.
  • Roles and Permission System
  • Easy Customization and Development
  • Support Many Integrations
  • Different Application Servers Support.
  • Device based Page View
  • Liferay Market Place

Liferay is ready to use web application

Liferay already is web application so that simple we can download and deploy in any machines. It’s ready to use application. Once we deploy we can directly.

The following tutorial for setup liferay


Liferay have many portlet to full fill dynamic web application functionality

Liferay have given many portlet to  build dynamic web application they have give more than 40 portlet in source code along with that we can also get many portlets from liferay market place.
Liferay market place is place where we get many real time portlets to use in our liferay web application. There we can get CE and EE portlet. Simple we can down lad and deploy in our liferay portal.

The following are links to get portlets



Very Good Enterprise Web Content Management System

 Web application consists of many web pages. Each web pages its own design and content. In real world application to manage content in application people came up with Web Content Management Systems. There are many web content management systems in market and liferay also have very good content management support. With this feature we can create web content, design content and publish content.

The WCM provide content management, content creation and content publishing.
Liferay have its own great feature that is called structures and templates from which we can design content without knowledge of CSS and html.

Admin will provide structures and templates by using that anyone can add web content without knowledge of CSS and HTML.

The following is information about liferay web content management


Sites, Organization and User Groups

Liferay has given sites, organization and User Groups. Based on our requirement we can take any one, so that we will get some generic feature to our application.
The following is link to get more about Sites and Organization


Social Network Portlet

Liferay have given many social networking portlet so that we can build social network web sites. These portlet have functionality to full fill basic needs for social network platforms.

The following is link to get more information


Document Library Management

Document Management system is for managed documents. Liferay have very good document management system winch implemented by Java Content Repository (JCR).
Liferay already integrated with Apache Jackrabbit JCR implementation and we can also integrate with other document management system like Alfresco.

The following is link to get more information



Collaboration (Blogs, Wikis and Forums)

Liferay have support for managing Blogs, Wikis and Forums. They have given portlet to meat wikis, blogs and forum functionality.

The following is link to get more information


Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Support

Liferay have very good support for SOA. Liferay can support SOAP and REST web service. We can expose liferay services in either ways. In liferay creating web services and accessing web services very easy.

Because of these web services we can integrate liferay portal with other applications. We can also develop mobile application by using these web services. In recent days liferay have came up with mobile SDK to build mobile applications
.
The following are links to get more information.





Dynamic Look and Feel from Themes

Liferay Look and feel can be changes by themes. Themes are very easy way to change liferay look and feel. In liferay we can develop themes very easy.

The following is link to get more information about themes in liferay.


Page layouts

Layout is page template and its portlet arrangement in page. Liferay have many page layouts apart from that we can develop our own layouts.

The following is more information about layouts.


Good Portal Administration User Interface.

Liferay have very good User Interface to manage liferay portal. Manage liferay portal is nothing but manage users, manage sites, manage organization, manage role and permissions and server management.

Liferay have control panel there we can manage all the things

The following is more information about liferay administration control panel.


Roles and Permission System

Liferay have very good permission system which archives from user roles. In liferay each user has role and each role have permissions. Permissions will decide accessibility or scope of user in the website.

Liferay by default have default roles and permission apart from that we can create roles and assign permission to role.

The following links is from more information about Roles and Permissions


Easy Customization and Development

Liferay have its own mechanisms to customize or develop new thing for portal.

Liferay have Plugins SDK from which we can do customization and development.

Liferay have following Plugins SDK to customize and development in liferay portal


Portlets Hook, Themes, Ext and Layouts


The following is link to get more information about Plugins SDK


Support Many Integrations

Liferay support many integration like Service Oriented Integration, SSO Integration, DAP Integration and Learning Management Tools Integration.

The following are links to get more information about integrations



Different Application Servers Support

Liferay have support for many application servers. Liferay releases portal with different application server flavors

The followings is liferay portal available in different servers support


Device based Page View

Liferay can render pages based on devices this is very useful when we show application in mobiles and tablets.

Liferay have responsive theme mechanism based on the device the view will be rendered in browser.

Liferay have Bootstrap theme support and its having own administration panel there we can define device rules. Based on device rules page will be rendered.

The following is link to get more information about liferay view in mobiles


Liferay Market Place

Liferay market place is the liferay applications hub there we can get liferay applications. We can get CE and EE liferay applications. We can also place applications in market place. In market place liferay applications will be packaged and once we download the application we can deploy in portal this task is very easy.

The following is link to get more information about market place


Resources

Liferay official releases and downloads


Liferay CE Public SVN Repository (username: guest & password: guest)


Liferay CE Current working source code


Liferay Documentation

https://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/user-guide

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