Blogs

And now a brand new episode of Liferay Cribs... Just kidding. But this is a non-technical blog post. For the past year and a half, I feel very fortunate to have been working for Liferay, and I'm just grateful to work with not only very smart people, but just really good people. It's very humbling. I feel genuine concern, from the top-level-on-down, not only for the quality and...

I recently had the realization that I was duplicating a certain set of code across multiple portlets. For those who know me, they will attest that my work motto is to work smart not hard. I hate code duplication with a fiery passion, thus something had to be done. The question was what? After some thought, I decided that I needed to make a taglib. I started coding it, and had a...

One of the topics I've seen over and over on the forums is confusion over the configuration of Hot Deploy in Liferay. It can be complicated, and the default configuration is not a valid one if you are not using Tomcat as your container, so people frequently run into problems with it. Since I have just finished a section in the official docs about this topic, I thought it would be good...

One of the things I was looking forward to when starting with Liferay was the opportunity to work at home full time. I've worked at home in the past, but it was always on an ad-hoc basis, on days when somebody had a doctor's appointment, the car needed servicing, etc. I'd go do whatever the errand was and then work at home for the remainder of the day so I wouldn't have to take a day...

So a couple of weeks ago, Ivan and I were trying to figure out how he could let his friend hit his Liferay tomcat without having to set up a demo server or using adobe acrobat connect. Basically, he needed the fastest way for someone to hit his local box from outside his network (China to US). A week earlier, I stumbled upon this tool called Hamachi, which allows you to...

This is a picture of the Liferay crew that has invaded ohio.   From left to right: David RisonBrett SwaimDavid TruongBrian KimSten Martinez It's getting cold!!! Notice how BKim has his ski jacket on.

I recently got myself a nice new mono laser printer with duplexing capabilities. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a good deal on a simple mono laser printer that has duplexing built in? You would think at this point that with all the effort going into selling color laser printers, the market in mono laser printers could be kept alive better if all the manufacturers would...

Remember the days of yore when the big annual college job fair came around?  Hundreds of anxious students gather, holding a stack of resumes under left arm while keeping their right hand dry for greeting potential employers.  The sight is humorous to behold, at least from an outsider's perspective, but from a student's point of view it's nerve wrecking!  Recently,...

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...

The nice thing about Liferay's drag and drop layout is that you (usually) don't have to remember any of the portlet ids. At least, until you do. If you skim through portal.properties, there's a set of properties all prefixed with default.user.layout which let you control this. However, it wants portlet ids, which Liferay doesn't readily give to you unless you dig through...

  I figured out how to do this when I was testing the message board subscriptions and the web form portlet. Configure your ROOT.xml to look like this: <Resource                         name="mail/MailSession" ...

A common question and topic when I do training or work on support cases, is, "What is the right way to do inter portlet communication in Liferay?" Well, there is no "right way" to do this. At least not yet. This is because IPC was left out of JSR-168. In other words, there is no standard API. As for JSR-286, there will be a IPC standard that will be an event system. IPC is on the...

Imagine this: (remember this is just a re-enactment, names have been changed to ensure privacy) It is Friday night and you are heading over to the friend's house, let's call him... Ryan Cheung, to hang. He whips out his shiny Apple Mac Pro and states that he has the new OS X Leopard and wants to experience the OS in it's entire glory. So, he turns it on and proceeds to start with...

While it's nice to blog about some of the tools I use (see the below posts on VirtualBox and the Lomboz plugin for Eclipse for more info), I figured I should probably mention some of the stuff I'm working on for Liferay. Though I'd like to think I was brought in because of my 1337 5k1||z, the fact of the matter is that I have only one ingredient that separates me from others (and it...

My previous post had much more success that I had ever imagined, which is good because it means that there is a lot of interest in the community to have a better wiki portlet. Also one of my conclusions after reading the comments is that there is a renewed interest in Liferay's bundled wiki portlet. This purpose of this second post is to explain, and show with screenshots, a set of...

Most engineers in Liferay, Inc. happen to be Windows users.  Me, I've got one of the few MacBook Pro's in the company. Ever since I joined the company in May 2005, I have used Macs to do my development.  In fact, I have been using Macs since 1994.  Sure, I am in the minority, but I do make a ruckus when things break on Safari.  Anyhow, in honor of the growing...

My operating system of choice happens to be Mandriva Linux. Currently, I am running the Mandriva Linux 2008 Power Pack release. I have been running Mandriva since the dawn of time in Linux parlance: since it was called Mandrake and was a derivitive of Redhat. Since I joined Liferay, I have found that I often need Windows in order to test and debug support tickets. I have a new machine...

I've been thinking a bit about the different technologies available to those thinking about integrating external applications into portal environments. One of the most requested questions we get in client situtations is "How do we integrate our exising applications written in PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc? I wish there was a straightforward answer to that, but unfortunately the answer is: it...

Our blogs has finally gotten a second look and I'm glad.  Blogs should be improved tredmendously and already I see people commenting on people's blogs.  Hopefully the response to blogs will be as positive as the ones we received for message boards and mail.  When Liferay decides to use our own products we really put in a lot of effort to make it a very good product so we...