Brian Chan
We decided to relax a bit Wednesday night and headed out to a Lakers game. After all, we are in LA, and we love basketball here. We had some pretty good seats. Here's a pic of Kobe laying it up. Here's a pic of other Liferay peeps wearing our retreat shirt. We actually got on the jumbo cam 3 times! But nothing beats how the game ended. We were afraid it would be a...
We flew almost the whole company out to Los Angeles for our annual retreat. It's been a great few weeks of brainstorming and fellowship. If you're a Liferay user, community member, or a client - and ever wondered how we work and have fun - there's no better way to communicate it than through this video.
GA 3 is a bug fix release for GA 2. Changes are available on our Issue Tracker. Downloads are available on SF.net.
GA 2 is a quick bug fix release for GA 1 that was released last week. It includes many bug fixes. Thanks to everyone who helped out. New features for Liferay 6 are listed on our Wiki. Release notes are available on our Issue Tracker. Downloads are available on SF.net.
Whew. Just finished the upload the Liferay Portal 6 GA! We hope you enjoy this release. Thank you for letting us serve you. We'll be blog'ng, wiki'ng, webinar'ng, and document'ng the many new features and improvements in the coming weeks. For more details about the new features read the wiki article: New Features in Liferay Portal v6.0. And you can use JIRA to...
Just released Liferay Portal 6 RC 2. We are very close to getting the GA now. We had originally scheduled to make this the GA, but our release team wanted to make one more round of releases. We're now scheduling to release GA in another 2-3 weeks. The major changes between RC 2 and RC 1 include changes to Workflow and OpenSocial as a first...
We recently installed 100 custom built Hudson test servers at our colo facility. They are maxed out on the RAM, have the fastest quad core available, and the second generation Intel SSD hard drives that Linus Torvalds recommended us. We had calculated the cost of doing it on the cloud, but it was a lot more economical for us to run it at our own colo facility because...
I barely made it to the Spain Symposium one hour before the event was supposed to start because of the chaos from the Icelandic ash cloud. But I'm glad I made it there safely. The event was very well attended and we could feel the excitement that the Spanish market has regarding open source, and specifically, regarding Liferay. Here's a picture of me giving a talk about...
Just released Liferay Portal 6 RC. It inclues a ton of bug fixes, included more of the plugins (workflow, etc.) that were not ready during Preview, and the new 7Cogs sample data. Go here for a full list of changes. Go SF.net to download the files.
Happy to announce the release of Liferay Portal 6 Preview. You can download the files from SourceForge here. The RC will be released in a few weeks with the GA to follow. Plugins for 6 will be released along with the GA. Note that this is a Preview release and should not be used in production. Enjoy!
You've heard of the Digg effect, but the same is true of the "Google" effect. We're celebrating Sesame Street's 40th anniversary today. Go to www.google.com and you'll see a nice reference to Big Bird. Click on it, and you'll see a reference to www.sesamestreet.org -> happily running on Liferay.
Anonymous access to Liferay's SVN servers now require inputting a username of "guest" with no password. We had to make this change due to some weird bugs with SVN. That means the command svn co svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk will not work, but the command svn co svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk --username guest will work. Access via...
This is a worker at my hotel who helped me replace my laptop hard drive. It was 4 am and I had given up because I didn't have a small screwdriver. We tried everything. Finally, he creatively used pliers and a large screwdriver to replace my Sony laptop hard drive. Not an easy thing to do. I had a 250 gb ocz solid state hard drive. It's fast for email usage,...
My stay in India was much more comfortable this time around than two years ago. Infrastructure is improving. My hotel was quite nice. In fact, it's as nice if not nicer than what I have at home. I stayed at the Iris Hotel, where the rest of the speakers of JAX India stayed. We were on Brigade St., the happening street in town. It is the equivalent of Michigan Ave. in...
Here are some pictures of our new India office. It's in the Raheja Arcade, smack in the center of the Koramangala, the IT district of Bangalore. I was deeply humbled to witness our expansion into India. In these tough economic times, not too many companies are expanding. We've been blessed to be a leader in the open source portal and collaboration space, where demand has actually gone...
It's a humbling reminder that Java, AJAX, and the latest Saturday Night Live skits aren't on Time's list of ten ideas changing the world right now. Sure, no one doubts that technology (and especially 2.0 technology) has been revolutionary, or that funny TV shows are a good way to relax. It's just a joyful reminder that we live in a big big world, and that big timeless...
Here are some pictures from our third annual company retreat in Los Angeles. It was really fun hanging out with everyone. And what do we do when we get together? Play an international sport everyone loves. Soccer! That's Ed, our head of sales, chasing Sang, our general manager in South East Asia. Glad no one got hurt. Look at Dave chase that soccer ball. If you...
The number of committers to our SVN repository and the sheer amount of activity have both skyrocketed this past year. Sun now has over 25 active contributors and Liferay, Inc. has been hiring key developers from all over the world as well. While that means increased productivity overall, it also means that SVN responsiveness is now much more important than it used to be. ...
Thanks to everyone who came to the European symposium. It was extremely fun and enjoyable! Here are some pictures and a summary of what happened. Here's Bryan Cheung giving his talk about how the UN uses Liferay. Just trying to do our part. Here's Jorge giving his session on leveraging the new portlet specification. Here's HanseMerkur giving a...
Previously, to customize a core portal JSP, you would have to use the ext environment. You can do it now in a plugin via our liferay-hook.xml file. Just specify a directory of where your custom JSPs are, and on deploy of that plugin (portlet, theme, hook, etc.), the core portal JSPs will be overwritten with what's in your plugin, and on undeploy, it'll be reverted back. When...
Thanks to everyone who came to participate in last Friday's meetup in sunny Los Angeles! It was loads of fun. Check out www.flickr.com/photos/tags/liferaymeetup2008 for more pics. Here are the guys from Italy who built pjoon, a popular Italian social network based on Liferay. Bryan and I giving our talk. Paul Bakaus giving a talk. He's the jQuery UI lead...
We're finally making our continuous integration server public. It took several months of fine tuning to get to this point. The main issues were with making sure that CruiseControl , Hudson, Selenium, and FireFox 3 were happy with each other. http://hudson.liferay.com On every commit, it’ll compile everything (including JSPs), reload the database, and...
Here we are relaxing at Chevy's after a long long day at JavaOne. The guys wearing blue jerseys are from Liferay and the rest are from the Sun team. It was a great time of enjoying good food, brainstorming ideas, and learning from each other.
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...
Wouldn't it be nice to deploy a portlet to Liferay and have it work as an application in Facebook? Check out our message boards at http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums Go to the bottom and click "Add to Facebook". We've configured our public message boards to write its output as FBML when consumed by Facebook. Check it out. Every portlet in Liferay is...
We recently upgraded our live site to use the latest 5.0.x branch. Besides that, we also introduced our first set of custom social networking portlets for use on www.liferay.com. They're code named "WOL" for World of Liferay. The code is available at http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk under the package wol-portlet. WOL serves two purposes. First, it...
I just got back from a week in Rome, part work, part vacation.. (like I ever go on vacation). Here are some highlights of the week. That's me with an original bust of Nero. He was the crazy emperor of Rome who used human beings he didn't like as human torches to light up Rome, hence the modern CD burning software with his name. I originally took this picture with...
Our recent announcement about jQuery caused a lot of confusion among the JSF camp because it seemed to contradict another announcement we made a few months ago concerning ICEfaces. So this blog is meant to clear that up. ICEfaces serves the need of abstracting Javascript from Java developers. It does that very well. It allows Java developers to develop using JSF to implement...
In 4.3.x, our out of the box Glassfish bundle was over 220 megs and only worked on Windows. In 4.4.x, with the help of Raju from Sun, we were able to create bundles for Glassfish around 135 megs in size. It provides a full JEE stack. I'm actually quite impressed with the speed and the GUI console from Glassfish. All in all, I think it's a pretty good replacement for WebLogic AS...
Enhancements include: An improved User and Organization System Users can now be members of more than one Organization Locations are now an Organization Type Roles can now be scoped by Organization LDAP Integration has been improved Improved Content Management, Staging and Import / Export Automatic document conversion to...
4.3.5 is the latest stable and recommended production release from Liferay. Release Notes: http://support.liferay.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10014&styleName=Html&version=10260 SVN Tag: http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/portal/tags/4.3.5/ This release includes more bug fixes. Most notable is that this fixes the problem with compiling large...
Usually, my wife is the one who has to wait for me to get to bed while I work on bug fixes, packaging releases, or coding new features. Not this time though. It's past midnight and she's the one up working. I'm quite amazed. I personally hate filing expense forms or dealing with any form of receipts and paperwork. And now I'm watching her literally crank through piles and piles of...
4.3.4 is the latest stable and recommended production release from Liferay. Release Notes: http://support.liferay.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10014&styleName=Html&version=10250 SVN Tag:http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/portal/tags/4.3.4/ It includes many numerous performance improvements and bug fixes. The most notable is that our Lucene...
I read this blog from Prashant. a few days ago about integration with Liferay and OpenSSO. http://blogs.sun.com/pdblog/entry/opensso_and_liferay_integration We just integrated the code snippets into Liferay so users can easily integrate with OpenSSO by just going to the Enterprise Admin portlet and entering the right settings. No more code or properties changes.
It's weird. I just had another one of those nights. I couldn't help myself. I just had to stay up late and keep coding. An idea here. A message post there. Ba DING. Ok. Gotta go code it. I just can't help myself. I think this is what makes open source unique. We work on our code when no one makes us do it. We stay up late at night because it's fun for us. And it's even better when...