Blogs

Happy new year everybody!! It's been a while since my last post and this will be a very short one. All I wanted to do is let everyone interested know that I'm working on improving the wiki again. After the latest changes there is been a renewed interest in Liferay's wiki and a company has agreed to sponsor some further improvements (let's give them a big thank you). After several...

While I was surfing the Wiki I found a distress signal coming from a discussion within an empty article. It was a Liferay user calling out for help. Bchan gave me a crash course in PHP portlets and I was on my way. Have no fear Sairam! How to Create a Simple PHP Portlet is now a real article. Here below is my very first PHP portlet. You might not be that impressed with my PHP...

I don't know how Bryan Cheung does it. I believe he flew over 100,000 miles last year, and I'm really quite surprised he's still sane. Why do I say that? Because if any of his trips are anything like the one I am currently on, then I have to give him some sympathy and a newfound respect. Right now I am in Frankfurt Germany with Mike Young (who actually had to take a train to Paris...

After several months in the working, we finally got Liferay's Document Library compliant to WebDAV Class 1, per RFC2518!!  It is still not Class 2 compliant, meaning locking does not work (and that also means Office and OS X still cannot edit files directly in the Document Library).  But, achieving Class 1 compliance is the necessary prerequisite and we are finally...

I haven't had 3 solid weeks off in a while, and let me tell you. I enjoyed every minute of it.   But I'm back to work today and actually, it feels good too. I love working at Liferay and it really helps that the people I work with are great.   I'm in Chicago on-site for a another client's project. Even though it is unusually warm today, wish me luck in surviving...

From the makers of the world's leading enterprise open source portal framework, Liferay is proud to introduce MySpace by Liferay, a Google Gadget, part of Liferay's growing implementation and support of the Google Gadget platform. MySpace by Liferay lets you quickly check your most important MySpace alerts through iGoogle, the Google personalized homepage. MySpace by Liferay was...

It's been exactly 10 years since I got my very first computer, which was on Christmas of '97, and was a $400 dollar IBM clone, running Windows  95. I didn't even know how to change my wallpaper, or use my computer for anything more than a CD player/Calculator/Solitaire machine. It's odd that exactly 10 years after getting my first computer, I am reaching another first, and that...

The Document Library portlet will provide document conversions in Liferay 4.4, here's a screenshot: This requires OpenOffice v2.0.3 or higher running as a service, locally or remotely. Here are the supported formats: From (any of) To (any of) Text Formats OpenDocument Text (*.odt) OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text (*.sxw)...

After reading through Jorge's blog post on the guidelines for Liferay contributions, and after following the link to the style guidelines on the Liferay wiki, I put together a configuration file which works with Eclipse's built-in code formatter to adjust the whitespace in your code so that is compatible with the stated Liferay guidelines. To use this configuration file, go to...

A few weeks ago I blogged about Tomcat's JNI native library.  Recently, I have been at a client site trying to squeeze every bit of speed out of the servers while running on a deployment with JBoss-Tomcat.  Now, I realized that you could not just run the standard Tomcat APR code because JBoss makes their own customizations to get Tomcat to run.  Rather, JBoss distributes...

Ever needed to do file content searches? NO! Then you probably aren't a programmer... j/k I frequently have to search lots of code for some pattern. You'd think this would be a trivial task, but not even large IDE's like Eclipse make this easy for you... usually they do... but not always. So, in the cases where my IDE doesn't do the trick I use Sagasu. Sagasu is a front end for...

So ive been tweaking with the LDAP stuff recently to make it easier for people to do LDAP integration in Liferay.  We've added some default LDAP server settings (feel free to send me corrections or additions.. i know there are many more LDAP servers out there) and also tweaked the code a bit to allow live "Test" buttons for the LDAP connection, user mapping and group...

Quietly and without much fanfare, we have released the first document in our new Liferay Documentation Project. This is because it's a rather small document, but it fills a need to have some instructions for using our Plugins SDK available. Since the Plugins SDK is now the preferred method for creating portlets and themes, not having it documented was sort of a glaring omission. This...

So yes, there has been a long delay from the last time I blogged, but I thought I would come back with something that I have actually been asked a lot about recently, which is CSS Inheritance. I'm finding out that front end technologies are like Sanskrit to many server side developers, which is strange, because CSS and Javascript, to me, are easier to understand. But issues like...

One of the toughest parts of contributing to Liferay is that we are very strict with the coding and design style. We do this because we believe that keeping a very high level of consistency is what allows the product to keep evolving at maximum speed. Fortunately there are very smart people in the community that have been able to learn this rules just by looking at the code and they...

That's right, Liferay, the world's leading enterprise open source portal framework with Fortune 500 clients in the U.S. and Europe, has developed a new super easy tool that helps you write your own iGoogle Gadgets, with a real-time preview! Nifty, huh? Your friends and loved ones will watch in awe as you create whole collections of new customizable high-grade groovy gadgets before...

This is a list of things I learned at the Liferay retreat. You should not give Nerf guns to developers with pent up energy from sitting around coding all the time.  Pandemonium will ensue. Many Liferay-ers are multi-talented. We have singers, guitarists, dancers (sort of), people who are good at sports, and, um, monkeys. There is debate over whether you need to be...

In the U.S they use AIM, in Europe they use MSN, but the true and rightful King of the Instant Messaging world is still, without a doubt, ICQ. ICQ (a cleverly pronounced oronym of "I Seek You") was first released in November of 1996 by Mirabilis, and from it's downloadable birth contained some of the most outstanding features still unrealized in the 'modern' IM world. 1. Offline...

I had the pleasure of training in Santo Domingo.

Determining the best strategy for doing releases is one of the hardest challenges of developing a software product. We get lot's of feedback related to it, although it's usually in the form of indirect comments or questions. Some very common examples are:    "When are you going to release the next version? I really need feature X"    "Another release? I just...