Blogs

Recently I happened across a thread where Carlos Santos Sáenz was asking about how to best set up Roles and permissions.  As I attempted to duplicate Carlos' efforts, I realized that the root cause of his (and probably so many other people's ) difficulties had to do with Liferay's UI.  I have to admit that it is confusing at times for me too, which is what motivated me to...

What is the hardest part about programming? I've heard many suggestions by peers, bosses, employees, students and professors. I've heard algorithms, front end (html/javascript), backend (database connections, classes), code analysis, and reading/decifering other peoples code just to name a few. While I would agree that all these things can have their hard parts, I don't believe...

Since there are now six Liferay developers living in Columbus, Ohio Monday through Thursday I was thinking that we could start showing up the JUGs if anybody is interested. I have done quite a bit of training on Liferay, and we would have a few guys there that really know the Liferay architecture well. If anybody would be interested in having us show up one night and speak on Liferay,...

When I first started at Liferay I started using Eclipse. After about six months I found the Web Toolkit for Eclipse. I used that for about a year and a half total, until I got staffed consulting for the current company I'm consulting for. Once I got here I saw that all the in house developers were using IntelliJ Idea. As we are an open source software company, we qualify for free...

I've been meaning all month to get my driver's license renewed. Here in New Jersey, this is the kind of thing many people have been trained to dread. Long wait times and surly people behind the counter were the norm for so long that I think the situation even became known across the country. I wanted to get this done early in the month so that I wouldn't get stuck with all the...

Need to access session attributes from Velocity?   Well, from a Velocity theme (*.vm), you can simply do something like:   $request.getAttribute("USER_ID")   or...   $request.getSession().getAttribute("LIFERAY_SHARED_VISITED_GROUP_ID_RECENT")     However, what about from a Velocity template in a Journal Content Portlet?...

In Hamburg trying to wrap up a project, and we've been working quite a lot. It's easy to forget how beautiful Hamburg is:          

I love Johnny Rockets Here is a pic of the Ohio crew in the new Johnny Rockets in CMH

Pentaho has created a set of sample portlets for integration with a JSR-168 compliant portlet container.  Though not designed explicitly for Liferay, I have started a Wiki for the installation of these portlets on Liferay.

It's been a while since my last post, but here I'm at it again. This will be the first of a series of posts where I plan to write about the latest improvements to Liferay as we develope them. I will not only talk about those that I develop myself but also about those done by others if I see that they do not do it themselves. The end purpose is to keep everyone interested more aware of...

Inside public men toilets at Dalian city of Mainland China, you may read this sign when you stand in front of urinal.   向前一小步, 文明一大步 One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization   Everytime I look at this sign, it reminds me the first astronaut stepped on the moon, Neil Armstrong. He said "That's one small step for man, One giant leap for...

What's this? Two blog posts within five minutes? Yes, well, I thought this would be appropriate as we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States. I've had this hanging on my wall for years. I originally got it from a humor mailing list years ago (2000, I think). --- TO BE THANKFUL FOR:The mess to clean after a party because I have been surrounded by friends.The...

Touch typists (like me) don't like to take their hands off the home row of the keyboard if they can at all help it. If I'm in the middle of doing something requiring intense concentration (such as writing or coding), I want distractions kept to a minimum. One of the most annoying things about the PC keyboard layout is that they put the Control key way down underneath the shift key on...

In Eclipse, everything is a plugin, including the IDE itself. So, if there's something which bothers you, all you need to do is replace the plugin with something which works in a way more consistent with your personal preferences, or if the plugin is open source, tweak the existing plugin to suit your needs. In my case, what bothered me was this: I don't have any reason to look at...

A lot of people I run into at trainings and on consulting gigs ask this question:   "How do I access Liferay via Web Services?"   Well, there are 2 basic things you need: 1) A way to get the stubs for Liferay Web Services 2) Some sort of client app to access the portal's services   OK. Honestly, here is the easiest thing you can do to get started:...

All I have to say is wow. Pure, unadulterated WOW. I have been waiting for the iPod of books to reach us, and I truly thought it would be either Sony's Librie, or more likely Apple. But it turns out to come from who now seems to be the most obvious supplier, but the one you would least suspect, and that's Amazon, the book people. This has seriously given me a level of excitement that...

In recent days, some of the engineers at Liferay reported some amazing performance gains with Liferay's Ant build system by using Linux instead of Windows. Well this peaked my curiosity to say the least. I've been working exclusively with Windows XP on my desktop since around 2001, and have only used with Linux on servers -- never for my desktop. Well I'm a former...

November 2007 Public Training was held in Reston, VA.

One of the goals I set for myself with regard to the Liferay documentation was to show people how to set up Liferay for development (either core, extension or plugins) in both of the leading open source IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans. I have been using Eclipse for many years,and so I know my way around that IDE pretty well. Plus that environment has been pretty much covered in the...

Need a good diff tool outside of something monolithic like your IDE? Ever wanted to compare one project folder to another beyond their respective repositories? Well, look no further than "Meld". Ubuntu install command: $ sudo apt-get install meld Meld is a great diff tool with all the toys and features you could ask for. The main window: Configuring...