Liferay-ICEsoft Technology Partnership

On 7/23/2007, Liferay and ICEsoft announced a technology partnership aimed at making the ICEfaces component suite available to JSF portlets within Liferay Portal. Work towards this goal actually began back in late 2006, when ICEsoft decided to make changes to their framework in order to support JSR-168 portlet containers. Back on 12/14/2006, ICEsoft posted a message at the ICEfaces forums titled "Liferay Portal-ICEfaces Integration" in order to test the waters and make sure there was market demand for such a feature. To date, that post has received over 37,000 views, making it one of the most viewed posts on the entire ICEsoft forum site. Needless to say, this caught the attention of the folks at ICEsoft and Liferay, and technical dialogs between our companies began.

Also back in late 2006, I started a parallel post at the Liferay discussion forums that had the same title. I was particularly interested in having the ability to use the ICEfaces component suite within Liferay. Then it happened: a user named Michael Roth (redly2001) posted a sample ICEfaces portlet for use within Liferay Portal. I downloaded his example, and was able to get it working. Nevertheless, I ran into several framework-related and component-related problems. I did my best to correct them, and sent the fixes to ICEsoft.

Since then, we at Liferay have been working closely with the software engineers at ICEsoft in order to further increase compatibility. The first fruits of these talks resulted in several Liferay/ICEfaces demos that were demonstrated in both the Liferay and ICEsoft booths at JavaOne 2007. On 7/10/2007, ICEsoft announced version 1.6 of ICEfaces with compatibility for Liferay Portal 4.3.0. Liferay is currently working with ICEsoft towards ICEfaces 1.7, which will contain additional bug fixes and compatibility with Liferay 4.3.1.

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