December 3rd, 2008 at 10:28 pm by Mika Koivisto
· Filed under Liferay, Ruby on Rails
I recently run into this project that allows you to run your Rails app as a JSR-286 portlet. The reference portal is ofcourse Liferay. As you might be aware Liferay can run portlets written in other languages than just Java. Liferay supports scripting languages such as PHP, Ruby and Groovy. Read more about rails portlet
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:09 pm by Mika Koivisto
· Filed under Liferay
Last weekend I noticed that Liferay had uploaded the first beta version of Social Office to SourceForge and of course I had to test drive it. It looks really good and quite easy to use. This really shows how solid base Liferay is for creating different kinds of applications and that’s what Social Office is an application. Social Office is built on upcoming Liferay Portal 5.2 using mostly features that are in the portal but using them in a easy to use social collaboration context.
One of the features I found it lacking is restricted sites. Now all the sites are public in the sense that anyone can access them. Having used MOSS for document management and collaboration they many times need to be able to create also restricted workspaces that are used to for collaboration with a smaller more restricted team. One such example could be the PR department of a publicly listed company preparing a press release. It would be a catastrophe if someone other than the company insiders could access that information before it is released to general public.
All in all really good job guys. I think there is a lot of potential for Social Office and I there is already a lot of interest from some of the organizations I work with.
Bryan wrote yesterday a good post about the features so I won’t go over them instead I recommend you read it. You can also download it yourself if you want to play with it.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:46 pm by Mika Koivisto
· Filed under Liferay
I was yesterday way too tired to write a report but here it comes. Yesterday had also some interesting talks but also one quite boring one.
The most interesting ones where Michael Han’s talk about Liferay performace tuning and benchmarks. Liferay has setup a performance testing environment that is quite realistic for production. They will be running benchmarks for following real world scenarios:
Michael also blogged about that so go check it for more detailed specs on the env.
Suresh Shamanna and Brian Chan showed off how to you Liferays staging and publishing workflow as well as remote publishing features. They are really cool. The only thing it’s missing is the ability to create remote publishing configurations that you can just go hit publish. Easy publishing to multiple locations. It’s currently too technical for our customers to use.
At the end of the day Bryan and Brian showed that Social Office is more than just slide ware by demoing it. It really looked cool and the best thing is that you can use it directly for Microsoft Office since it talks Sharepoint protocol. The Sharepoint protocol addition should be part of the portal and if I understood correctly they are also releasing Social Office under GPL.
All in all very successful symposium. Great work guys especially Suresh and his team for making it happen. Also thanks for having me over dinner after the symposium it was great meeting you all of you in person.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:21 pm by Mika Koivisto
· Filed under Liferay
Thought I’d write a quite report of todays talks to those that weren’t able to attend Liferay European Symposium in Frankfurt. Both Brian Chan and Bryan Cheung talked about Liferays philosophy of giving. They both showed interesting things that you can do with the upcoming Liferay 5.2. Brian show a climps of a new Liferay product called Social Office. It is basically is a Liferay portal that provides a lot of the same features as Sharepoint including Sharepoint protocol support.
Bryan showed what they have done with IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) and their Rural Poverty Portal. What they have done their is use and extend the Liferay tagging system and JSR-286 support by creating tagging aware portlets both custom ones and Liferay ones that should be available in later releases. The most interesting thing was the tag aware navigation and asset publisher.
Jorge Ferrer gave a really good presentation on JSR-286 and gave some background why things like page to page linking will never be in the portlet spec. The portlet spec only describes the container where the portlets are run and not the portal itself. There should be a punch of other specs for different aspects of the portal. Hopefully well see those someday.
Brian Kim announced that Liferay will create a commercial Enterprise version. Now before you start worrying too much about it I must tell you that it WON’T follow the Alfresco model. Basically nothing changes except companies that NEED long support over releases will get it if they buy an enterprise version subscription. Also enterprise version release cycle will be a bit slower than community version. Community version will be released about every 4 months where as enterprise will be every 8 months. Each enterprise version will be supported for about 4 years so you will get bug fixes backported to your version as long as you pay the enterprise subscription. Community versions will be only supported until the next major version is released as it is currently. They also told that there won’t be any enterprise only features but there might be some Liferay products like the Social Office that is available to paying customers only.
Nate gave a really good speech about usability and user interaction and how patterns help create more usable and maintainable software.
There was also two Liferay customers BMW and HanseMerkur talking about what they are doing with Liferay. The day ended with free beer and games. Yes you read it right FREE beer.
I’ve taken some pictures during the symposium and will post the in Flickr.
Technorati Tags: Liferay, Europe, Symposium
August 21st, 2008 at 10:57 pm by Mika Koivisto
· Filed under Liferay
Haven’t been blogging for a while so I thought I’d write a quite post about Liferay European Symposium. If you’ve missed it you still have time to register. It’s in Frankfurt, Germany from September 23rd to 24th. The agenda and featured speakers were announced today. Some of the speakers will include Brian Chan, Jorge Ferrer, Bryan Cheung, Nate Cavanaugh and Paul Bakaus so all in all it should be interesting.
I couldn’t attend the LA meetup but thankfully I’ll be able to attend this event so if you want to meetup for bear or what ever just drop me a note.
Details for the event from Liferay’s site.
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