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If you've been following what we're been doing here at Liferay, you'll notice a lot of collaboration with Sun this past year. So now it's time that we make this public.

But before I get to that, I want to thank the Liferay community. And if you're reading this, that means you.

What am I thankful for? Well. It's simple. We're not alone.

Even though Liferay, Inc. has grown as an organization with millions of dollars in revenue a year and now employs over 65 people around the world, we're still just a tiny company in the sea of companies out there. And we have very limited resources.

But we're not alone. You guys are here along for the ride.

The truth is, we're not smart enough, we don't have enough man power, and we don't have enough energy to build an innovative product without you guys. So, thank you. Thank you for posting over 50,000 message boards posts. Thank you for giving us over a million downloads. Thank you for participating. Thank you for entrusting us with the stewardship of making a product that can serve others. Thank you.

As Liferay has matured (both the community and the company behind the product), what we've realized is that how we interact with the community has evolved as well. What does that mean? Well, earlier on, when we first started 8 years ago, we dealt with contributors at an individual level. Individuals contributed X, Y, and Z. As we've grown, we found ourselves dealing not just with individuals, but with other open source innovators like Alfresco and Day that help us with our JSR 170 repository, Hibernate with our persistence layer, Intalio and jBPM with our workflow, Spring with our flexible architecture, IceSoft with our Ajax JSF usage, Caucho with our PHP integration, jQuery with our JavaScript framework... and the list goes on.

And as we've evolved, we realize that now we're not just collaborating with individuals or with smaller open source innovators, but with established enterprises who have a much longer track record. That's where Sun comes in.

I first met the Sun guys last year at JavaOne. I showed them the features of Liferay and they showed me the features of SunPortal. There was mutual respect. Sun realized that we were innovators in building a light weight Web 2.0 portal and we realized that Sun knew a lot about implementing standards and containers and making thing scale massively for enterprise customers.

It was easy from the start.

And here's what we did...

Sun: Hey, you guys need better OpenSSO integration.

Liferay: Can you help us?

Sun: Yes. We know OpenSSO really well because we wrote it. Here's how it works. Oh, btw, your Glassfish integration is broken in combinations X, Y, and Z.

Liferay: Really? We didn't know that. How do we fix it?

Sun: Here's the fix.

Liferay: Hey, did you guys implement JSR 286 and WSRP 2 already?

Sun: Yes.

Liferay: Great, we need some help integrating it into Liferay so we can concentrate on implementing a features and not implementing standards.

Sun: Sure. Here are the names of the devleopers to work with.

Liferay: Thanks!

And that was about a year ago and I've just listed a small set of the over all help that is coming from Sun.

One important note. The collaboration is not superficial. It's deep. At Liferay, we believe that fostering the community means trusting the community. And that's why we've always granted committer status to non Liferay employees who've earned it. And Sun has proven to us over the past year that they understand open source, and that's why we've granted Sun developers commit access to Liferay (and them to us). Btw, many open source companies don't allow that.

So what does that mean for the future?

As we open up Liferay and more and more, expect more features and a better product because our community is growing every day.

From a technology perspective, we believe a JEE 286 portal is specifically well positioned to be the focal point of application integration at the UI tier. And we believe portals are a great platform for delivering and consuming applications, especially as the Web evolves beyond SOA toward WOA and as widgets become more and more accepted in enterprises.

At the end of the day, a portal is an application platform. And that means we're going to build lots of applications on Liferay. Document management and web content management applications are there. Blogs, message boards, email, calendar, and wikis are there. And you guessed it, the next set of applications are social services that tie into our other applications and delivered on our portal and consumable from plain old websites.

And, before I forget, thanks for participating.

For more info, check out:

http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/partners/sun
http://www.glassfish.org/portal