Blogs

Exposing well hidden features Those of you who attended my "Well Hidden Features of Liferay" presentation at the 2012 european symposium might remember the well hidden monitoring information that LIferay is able to hide at the bottom of each page, in HTML comments (when configured properly). (You can also listen to the recording of this presentation on Radio Liferay) The slide...

If you have been curious about Maven, or if you would like to use Maven to develop Liferay plugins, we have a new chapter dedicated to Maven--Developing plugins using Maven found in the Liferay Portal 6.1 Development Guide. After reading the new Maven chapter you will be able to: Understand the benefits of using Maven Set up your Maven environment quickly Use a...

Ok, so don't. This doesn't mean you can't gain advantage of Liferay. Also, what follows is not just a story about Sharepoint. If you have any HTML site of any kind you can gain advantages from using Liferay. Liferay has this crazy simple mechanism called "widgets". Yup widgets! The term has been used, we know, but Liferay has seriously had this feature since at least...

  During a joint meeting in Liferay Brazil, Fernando Areias had an idea of being able to deploy (portlets, themes, etc.), or any component of the SDK derived directly from the Finder by selecting one or more components. Based on this, I've created a simple automator service where through the finder, you can select one or more folders of some components that you want to...

Ding dong! The witch is dead! Which old witch? The 7Cogs witch! [EDIT: Part II covers additional stuff beyond this post!). This isn't news anymore - Starting with 6.1, Liferay replaced the sample data in the bundled Liferay download with a much leaner set of pages and web content that didn't overrun your database with data that was generally the first thing to be removed...

Liferay has been slowly integrating an OSGi framework into it's core; not in the sense that Liferay will nessecarily run "within" an OSGi runtime itself (there are arguments for doing that, and it's possible to a certain extent but the gain just isn't in doing that just yet), more that Liferay will "host" and OSGi runtime within itself that Liferay will utterly control. Why do...

For years Alloy has been known as the JavaScript Framework behind Liferay. This was great, because it's helped the project to grow a lot, but at the same time, it has restricted the project to a particular audience. So now we want to present a different approach, we want Alloy to be recognised as a great JavaScript Framework used by many great projects, not just Liferay. ...

We just released updates to Sync Android and iOS!   This update includes some nice features: Renaming of files and folders Upload and deletion of multiple files Mark files as favorites for offline access Display of metadata such as author, upload date, version, etc Open and share files with external apps ...

  This is another episode recorded at the European Symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden. Zsolt Balogh, head of Liferay's Support for the EMEA reason talks about the pain points that led to developing a custom issuetracker and support management system. Enterprise customers know what he's talking about: Liferay is using LESA to handle support issues, fix and escalate them. To follow the...

One of Liferay's key strengths has always been its flexibility.  This stems from Liferay starting out as a consultant-based, services-oriented company.  Every customer had different requirements that were never envisioned as part of the product.  Each time a new requirement was met, facilities were developed to ensure that other requirements in that same area could...

The title will probably make some people argue that it was never gone on the first place. That's true. But there are some resources out there trying to convince you that   User and Power User roles are basically the same thing. Some even state that  Power User is there for legacy reasons but it's not and will not be used by Liferay in a future....

Here I am again with another in the series about Liferay's architecture. If you haven't read them yet, the four previous entries covered: Overview, Services Layer, Web Services and Service Builder. This time I'm going to cover a very important concept: caching. In today's web, it's impossible for a web application to provide even good enough performance in the web unless it has a...

I really enjoyed the JSFCentral Interview by Kito Mann. The podcast was posted on December 06, 2012.   Some of the topics we discussed: Liferay Portal Liferay Faces JSR 329 CDI

Ever wandered what it takes to build a product like Liferay? Let me show you in a ... very visual way. Please sit comfortably and watch how the time flies (not to mention the developers) and several years of source code history draws an extraordinary picture in just  8 minutes:   For those of you who are more concerned about how the video was made...

Many years ago, Liferay's build validation was only getting started and so JSP pre-compilation related slowness wasn't a big deal (I think it was really only used during the distribution process). However, I wanted to make it faster for a client-related project (where we couldn't really do a server warm-up after deployment) and the research culminated in a blog entry summarizing my...

Today, Paul Miller released a nice list of the ”Most active GitHub users”. People started to talk about it and suddenly I received a lot of congratulations messages for being the #50 most active contributor on Github. I was pretty happy because this is a chance to show how Liferay employees are strong in the open source community. But I was mostly surprised, since there’s...

Everyone knows of Liferay's flagship software product, Liferay Portal, but Liferay actually develops and releases many other products in the Liferay ecosystem. At any one time, development is occurring on all of these products in one way or another, but most people don't learn of these other products until they show up in a press release or are otherwise waved in the air when they are...

New year's resolution: Publish more podcast episodes. Let's start - Happy New Year, wishing you all the best for 2013...   This is a solo episode with yours truly. I had a lot of fun preparing and presenting this session, "Well Hidden Features", at the european symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden/Germany, as well as in Milano. They both built upon earlier presentations at the nordic...

Once upon a time, a long time Liferay user decided to upgrade from an old version of Liferay (Liferay 6.0 GA2) to a new version of Liferay (Liferay 6.1 GA2). They performed this upgrade by shutting down Liferay 6.0 running on an old VM, starting Liferay 6.1 on a new VM, and then doing some DNS magic and some load balancer magic to switch to using the new VM after the upgrade completed....

One of Liferay's "secret" ingredients, specially with regards to its architecture, is Service Builder. This is the tool that glues together all of Liferay's layers and that hides the complexities of using Spring or Hibernate under the hood. Service Builder was originally built when Liferay used EJBs for everything (in fact it's name back then was EJBBuilder). EJBs were actually...