Blogs

There are a handful of events where I get to step outside of the day to day administrative tasks of Liferay to meet our community and interact with developers. JavaOne is one event that allows me that privilege.

This year we went up with a team made up of core and front-end developers, marketeers and Tundry, the stuffed penguin. (If you haven't already checked out the "Jon Neal Blog," you should.)

Personally, I've been attending for the past 4 years and can't help but notice that they had a drop in attendance - possibly due to the economy or the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle. However, despite the diminished crowd we still had great interaction with Liferay users and soon-to-be Liferay users. :)

We still get asked the basic questions like, "What is Liferay?" and "If you're free, how do you make money?" which just goes to show that there is growth potential in both the Liferay and the Open Source markets. But here are my top 5 most asked questions from the conference:

1) What technology do you use? Besides being the vaguest question someone can ask at a technical conference, this question is important. People want to know what's the core foundation of Liferay's software. The answer - Java on the back end and JavaScript for the UI.

2) How does Liferay differ from Drupal or Joomla? Drupal and Joomla are PHP based CMS products that built their portal frameworks as an after thought. Liferay is a Java based portal platform that built a CMS solution. You build a house from the foundation up, not the other way around. So if down the line you wanted your website to do more then just have CMS functionality you can with Liferay. Plus, one of the beauties of our Java core is that it allows plugin applications to be built in other programming languages (PHP, Ruby, etc). The competition is stuck using php-only applications while with Liferay your application pool just quadrupled.

3) What is Social Office and when is it available? Answer: Social Office is Liferay's solution for those looking for a social collaboration tool. It's a pre-set framework with built in document sharing, wiki, blogs, shared calendars, etc. so you can begin collaborating out of the box. Sharing is caring. Social Office Beta 1 is out right now for download and Beta 2 will be out in July with new features such as a tasks portlet and a contacts portlet.

4) Are you JSF 2.0 compliant? JSF 2.0 came out a week ago, so no. Liferay works with other JSF providers and they will be making sure their products are JSF 2.0 compliant. For example, IceSoft is about one week away from implementing JSF 2.0 in their newest version. We'll be working with them to make sure their new version will work well in Liferay.

5) How is the Liferay Standard Edition different from your EE? Our Enterprise Edition is a hardened version of our Standard Edition which means you can safely build your website knowing that you'll get your bugs fixed without necessitating an upgrade to the latest version of Liferay. Liferay's SE is open sourced under the MIT license while EE is just under $3000/server for our Basic subscription.

These top 5 were the ones I fielded and since I'm not a developer I pushed off technical questions to the developers. If you want their top 5 you'll have to wait till one of them blogs about it.

Until the next Liferay event, it's back to number crunching for me.