RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-13T18:46:33Z

I believe this thread has run its course, so am closing it. I want to thank Bill his thoughts and everyone else for keeping things civil! Cheers!

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-13T18:19:41Z

jelmer kuperus:

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it

Everytime i see a comment like this i am compelled to google the posters name to verify if it isn't really James indulging himself in some astroturfing.
Having used Liferay for a significant amount of time I just simply cannot phantom someone having a high opinion of it.

Must be this stockholm syndrom thing or something..

Sit down and write your own portal with all of the features of Liferay and get back to me on that would you please?

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-13T12:01:13Z

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it

Everytime i see a comment like this i am compelled to google the posters name to verify if it isn't really James indulging himself in some astroturfing.
Having used Liferay for a significant amount of time I just simply cannot phantom someone having a high opinion of it.

Must be this stockholm syndrom thing or something..

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-13T07:16:30Z

What is the problem with Liferay's documentation?

WHAT IS THE REAL PROBLEM?

Main problem is that everyone is trying to gain profit on liferay, and some are doing this by copying the java-docs to their server. This has resulted in tons of Google-hits on the first google pages for the same java-doc stored on different servers.
So if you want to know how a specific function "functions" and you search for it on google, you have to skip the first 200 results because they are all the same.

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it. Sorry guys... this is not highschool were you can send your dad to, to complain about a teacher.
If you can't get something running, it is you. only you that fails.

If Liferay was document to the max, a lot of us wouldn't make any money with their job

If anybody would post the construction of their portlet we all could benefit, but who benefits of the portlet...

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-13T00:05:00Z

Actually, to clarify even further, we only used to charge for the hard copy versions of our administrator guides, and that's because we used a third-party publishing company. The soft copy version was always free.

You might be thinking of Liferay in Action, which is something you do have to purchase, and that's because we worked with Manning Publications Co. to ensure that we delivered a higher-quality book than what is out there by other publishers. But we were and are still committed to continually improving the online documentation, because the truth is, we're not trying to build a business selling documentation. =)

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T22:20:05Z

Brian left some facts out. To be fair, I'll fill it in.

Liferay.com used to sell their documentations including administrative guides.
They, nevertheless, have "seen the light" and are now providing their documentations online.

So, it's true the Liferay.com was trying to make money by selling their documentations but many other projects do it.
I'll also add in that what Liferay.com was selling is less then the current online documentations. So, I don't think it's
true that they are still trying to sell EE by not offering documentations.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T22:12:16Z

Interesting how attractive the subject of this thread is. Initially I was annoyed but this thread has solicited much contribution - albeit some via mindless braindump.

And on that note:

I personally am appreciative of having so much opensource and freeware available, including Liferay CE. Just looking at all the opensource libraries involved shows just how cool an assembly Liferay really is.

Yeah things can improve and evolve including wrt documentation. Not being that good at documentation myself, I am in awe of many who try and also am in awe of those like David and Hitoshi and others who take the time to help people along.

Code being difficult to read ? The more I review Liferay code, the more I learn about what good coding and architecture is.

But perhaps I am going off topic... and back to work I go...

RE: Liferay sucks!! - may be not so.

2012-09-12T22:03:31Z

I think it should be mentioned that Liferay is a deployment platform and not just a framework for web app development. As a platform it provides a tremendous amount of infrastructure out of the box that can be used immediately without any custom development.

Liferay also doesn't restrict from using other web development frameworks, such as Icefaces and Vaadin, for developing your custom portlets. I know that both of these frameworks are Ajax enabled.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T21:46:58Z

Actually, there are many big name universities offering free courses, including from MIT, Harvard, Berkely, Stanford :
http://ocw.mit.edu , http://edx.org , http://coursera.org , just to get you started

Yes, to some but not all courses. So liferay.com is making CE available for free and charging for EE like these institutions are providing some free courses and charging for others. Institutions also need money to operate as liferay.com.

The point about lack of documentation is valid. It is not fair to claim it is "open source" if you are going to obfuscate the code before you put it out. Although obviously not at this extreme, I am sure Liferay.com is conscious that their code is sufficiently difficult to read that the EE support becomes the only way forward.

Well, I don't have any trouble now and I only have CE and haven't taken any liferay.com's training. There are now more documentations now compared to when I started so it should be easier now.
I don't know why I can and why you can't.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T18:33:02Z

Pradeep Pandey:

Hey Hillston
It may be hard for you to understand.".what is liferay". If you want to survive in IT industries then You have to do smart work not hard work

Some real good advice there.

"It is a poor craftsman indeed who blames his tools."

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T18:22:57Z

The point about lack of documentation is valid. It is not fair to claim it is "open source" if you are going to obfuscate the code before you put it out. Although obviously not at this extreme, I am sure Liferay.com is conscious that their code is sufficiently difficult to read that the EE support becomes the only way forward.

This is the fundamental prob with "Community Editions" .. when comparing to proper .org contributions.

At a Server Side conference dating back to 2005 or 2006 (I forget), one of the questions was whether we were going to have documentation for our product. At the time, we were probably less than 10 people and were obviously constrained by our own limitations. We're always trying to improve our documentation, but the truth is that it takes time to do this right. Take a look at our Liferay in Action book - that took over a year to actually complete. In parallel, we also made sure to beef up our Documentation pages.

Contrary to what you think, we're actually doing our best to make documentation better and are by no means trying to make reading the source code difficult to read. If that were the case, you'd see a lot of spaghetti code everywhere, super long method names, or even code that spills to 180 columns. And to be honest, if we were in the business of making our source code hard to read on purpose, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be in business in the years to come because people wouldn't want to use us. We've hired guys to add Javadocs to our source code, but that takes time too. Please be patient with us, we're doing our best.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T16:24:22Z

Hitoshi Ozawa:

I haven't heard too much about private universities not providing their education for free.

Actually, there are many big name universities offering free courses, including from MIT, Harvard, Berkely, Stanford :
http://ocw.mit.edu , http://edx.org , http://coursera.org , just to get you started

The point about lack of documentation is valid. It is not fair to claim it is "open source" if you are going to obfuscate the code before you put it out. Although obviously not at this extreme, I am sure Liferay.com is conscious that their code is sufficiently difficult to read that the EE support becomes the only way forward.

This is the fundamental prob with "Community Editions" .. when comparing to proper .org contributions.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-12T12:41:22Z

Liferay also provides development training and consulting services as well.

I'm sure you're not working for free and if you're not providing your software source code to the public, I don't really think you have a valid point to complain about. If you don't want to use your own time to study by yourself, pay for education. I haven't heard too much about private universities not providing their education for free.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-11T03:10:38Z

The question of in depth javadoc is the biggest issue that Bill raised.

I would suggest comparing the javadoc for java itself with that of Liferay.

For developers to work with an API it is never enough to understand it in general, it has to be understood in detail. The evidence that this is true is the number of discussions in the liferay community where people are asking how to do things and a Liferay engineer answers with "well of course you use xxxxUtil.methodzzzz()" as if the questioner had any way to know this without being told.

At the very least the service layer APIs should have contract documentation for all method signiatures. At best they would also have some use case documentation. The javadoc can have links to extended documentation on this site if really needed but package layer documentation in javadoc would be better. The code for 6.1 service layer does show some bare minimum documentation, which is excellent. However it does not tend to provide valid ranges for parameters or use cases that would clarify. For example com.liferay.portal.service.UserLocalServiceUtil.dynamicQuery(DynamicQuery, int, int, OrderByComparator). Why is this part of the User service? Can the query only be about users? Are only user records returned? Can the OrderByComparator be null (this is given in the javadoc, the answer is yes)? Can you specify the upper and lower bound to be "give me everything"? How would you do that?

Where there is bad grammar I would rather you just place a flag in the javadoc that will bring someone to eventually fix it up and leave the untidy javadoc in place. It will be better than no javadoc at all.

As for the need of only core engineers to know about deeper things, that may be true in most cases, but many of us need to write utilities. For example I am writing a portal instance export/import system so that we can split a monolithic liferay with over 80 instances into four portals with 20 instances, all in shards. To do this I have to understand the counter services which has proved to be quite difficult. See http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/16004741

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-10T22:22:32Z

Well, these guys must be compensated somehow for their hard work, don't they?

Agree on this. This is a off topic, but that's why I don't think we should be answering to questions pertaining only to EE here because that'll erode their business. Just stick with CE questions here and let liferay.com sell their support to EE users. They're giving us a good software to use, so at least let them do their business.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-10T22:18:38Z

I can assure you there's no secret source code that is more commented than the CE or EE code.

From the looks of it, I don't think there is either. From the information I've seen, EE still have some bugs when it is released but
Liferay.com is providing patches afterwards.

I think what developers wants is more documentations intact regardless of the grammerical quality.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-07T18:23:45Z

I can assure you there's no secret source code that is more commented than the CE or EE code.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-07T15:04:00Z

Mazhar Alam:

Yaa..exactly..where is BILL..???

He got some answers for sure and I bet he had read this messages May be he was just being troll, frustrating of something of LR. Anyway good discussion and he still can join.

Negative comments are usually better are more beneficial than good ones, like when you are partisipating scum's retrospective

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-07T12:39:09Z

David H Nebinger:

I thought that, too, until we got EE and could see in the EE source that there is little if any javadoc there, too.

I see...
Well, one can still argue that they have in-line comments etc, kept for their core development team, but since an EE license includes (if I'm not mistaken) consulting and so on, the only good reason I could think of is to prevent from comments leaking out to community (which would in turn, compromise the whole "keep those for us, so we are needed" idea...). Anyway, that's why we all post day by day; in order to fill bit by bit, all the missing stuff one could need. (Am I not inspiring? )

RE: Liferay sucks!!

2012-09-07T12:18:23Z

Mazhar Alam:

Yaa..exactly..where is BILL..???

Bill was a troll. We've fed him, so now he'll lie in wait for another day when he can start another firestorm...