Could development in Liferay be improved? The answer is allways yes. And, how could development be improved? This may have several answers, and one of them is Romulus.

Romulus is an R&D project funded by the European Union. The overall purpose of the project is to improve the productivity of developers of the Java platform (which has a huge installed base in Europe) by applying a variety of innovative ideas and techniques. The project involves a lot of research including evaluation of development technologies available (for Java and other platforms), determining the main pain points for developers, identifying areas where more productivity can be achieved, etc. It also includes the improvement of the two Open Source projects involved in Romulus, Roma and Liferay, to make it easier to develop for and with them.

Eurpean projects are carried out by consortiums of research labs and companies. Together with Liferay there are other 6 partners: Germinus (a Spanish company and project leader), AssetData, Imola (both Italian companies), Deri (an Irish reseach lab), UPM (the largest Spanish technical university) and ICI (a Romanian research institution).

What are Liferay's tasks? We are responsible for all the research related to portals as well as for all the development oriented to achieve maximum productivity when working with Liferay Portal in particular. The project developments will be made to allow faster portal app development through the use of scripting languages and frameworks, allowing the creation of client side applications (aka lifelets) and portal mashups (reusal of functionalities provided by the portal by portal applications), etc.

That's about it for now. For those interested please feel free to ask questions and offer ideas. There is a website of the project (developed with Liferay) available at http://www.ict-romulus.eu/