Service-oriented architecture
Liferay Portal uses service-oriented architecture (SOA) design principles throughout and provides the tools and framework to extend SOA to other enterprise applications. Under the Liferay enterprise architecture, not only can the users access the portal from traditional and wireless devices, but developers can also access it from the exposed APIs via REST, SOAP, RMI, XML-RPC, XML, JSON, Hessian, and Burlap.
Liferay Portal is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the portlet API compliant with both JSR-168 and JSR-286. A set of useful portlets are bundled with the portal, including Documents and Media, Calendar, Message Boards, Blogs, Wikis, and so on. They can be used as examples to add custom portlets. In a word, the key features of Liferay include using SOA design principles throughout, such as reliable security, integrating the portal with SSO and LDAP, multitier and limitless clustering, high availability, caching pages, dynamic virtual hosting, and so on.
Understanding Enterprise Service Bus
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a central connection manager that allows applications and services to be added quickly to an enterprise infrastructure. When an application needs to be replaced, it can easily be disconnected from the bus at a single point. Liferay Portal uses Mule or ServiceMix as ESB.
Through ESB, the portal can integrate with SharePoint, BPM (such as the jBPM workflow engine and Intalio | BPMS engine), BI Xforms reporting, JCR repository, and so on. It supports JSR 170 for content management systems with the integration of JCR repositories, such as Jackrabbit. It also uses Hibernate and JDBC to connect to any database. Furthermore, it supports an event system with synchronous and asynchronous messaging and a lightweight message bus.
Liferay Portal uses the Spring framework for its business and data services layers. It also uses the Spring framework for its transaction management. Based on service interfaces, portal-impl is implemented and exposed only for internal usage—for example, they are used for the extension environment. portal-kernel and portal-service are provided for external usage (or for internal usage)—for example, they are used for the Plugins SDK environment. Custom portlets, both JSR-168 and JSR-286, and web services can be built based on portal-kernel and portal-service.
In addition, the Web 2.0 Mail portlet and the Web 2.0 Chat portlet are supported as well. More interestingly, scheduled staging and remote staging and publishing serve as a foundation through the tunnel web for web content management and publishing.
Liferay Portal supports web services to make it easy for different applications in an enterprise to communicate with each other. Java, .NET, and proprietary applications can work together easily because web services use XML standards. It also supports REST-style JSON web services for lightweight, maintainable code and supports AJAX-based user interfaces.
Liferay Portal uses industry-standard, government-grade encryption technologies, including advanced algorithms, such as DES, MD5, and RSA. Liferay was benchmarked as one of the most secure portal platforms using LogicLibrary's Logiscan suite. Liferay offers customizable single sign-on (SSO) that integrates into Yale CAS, JAAS, LDAP, NTLM, CA Siteminder, Novell Identity Manager, OpenSSO, and more. Open ID, OpenAuth, Yale CAS, Siteminder, and OpenAM integration are offered by it out of the box.
In short, Liferay Portal uses ESB in general with an abstraction layer on top of an enterprise messaging system. It allows integration architects to exploit the value of messaging systems, such as reporting, e-commerce, and advertisements.
Understanding the advantages of using Liferay to build an intranet
Of course, there are lots of ways to build a company intranet. What makes Liferay such a good choice to create an intranet portal?
It has got the features we need
All of the features we outlined for our intranet come built into Liferay: discussions, wikis, calendars, blogs, and so on are part of what Liferay is designed to do.
It is also designed to tie all of these features together into one searchable portal, so we won't be dealing with lots of separate components when we build and use our intranet. Every part will work together with others.
Easy to set up and use
Liferay has an intuitive interface that uses icons, clear labels, and drag and drop to make it easy to configure and use the intranet.
Setting up the intranet will require a bit more work than using it, of course. However, you will be pleasantly surprised by how simple it is—no programming is required to get your intranet up and running.
Free and open source
How much does Liferay cost? Nothing! It's a free, open source tool.
Here, being free means that you can go to Liferay's website and download it without paying anything. You can then go ahead and install it and use it. Liferay comes with an enterprise edition too, for which users need to pay. In addition, Liferay provides full support and access to additional enterprise edition plugins/applications.
Liferay makes its money by providing additional services, including training. However, the standard use of Liferay is completely free. Now you probably won't have to pay another penny to get your intranet working. Being open source means that the program code that makes Liferay work is available to anybody to look at and change. Even if you're not a programmer, this is still good for you:
- If you need Liferay to do something new, then you can hire a programmer to modify Liferay to do it.
- There are lots of developers studying the source code, looking for ways to make it better. Lots of improvements get incorporated into Liferay's main code.
- Developers are always working to create plugins—programs that work together with Liferay to add new features.
Probably, for now, the big deal here is that it doesn't cost any money. However, as you use Liferay more, you will come to understand the other benefits of open source software for you.
Grows with you
Liferay is designed in a way that means it can work with thousands and thousands of users at once. No matter how big your business is or how much it grows, Liferay will still work and handle all of the information you throw at it.
It also has features especially suited to large, international businesses. Are you opening offices in non-English speaking countries? No problem! Liferay has internationalization features tailored to many of the world's popular languages.
Works with other tools
Liferay is designed to work with other software tools—the ones that you're already using and the ones that you might use in the future—for instance:
- You can hook up Liferay to your LDAP directory server and SSO so that user details and login credentials are added to Liferay automatically
- Liferay can work with Alfresco—a popular and powerful Enterprise CMS (used to provide extremely advanced document management capabilities, which are far beyond what Liferay does on its own)
Based on "standards"
This is a more technical benefit; however, it is a very useful one if you ever want to use Liferay in a more specialized way.
Liferay is based on standard technologies that are popular with developers and other IT experts and that confer the following benefits on users:
- Built using Java: Java is a popular programming language that can run on just about any computer. There are millions of Java programmers in the world, so it won't be too hard to find developers who can customize Liferay.
- Based on tried and tested components: With any tool, there's a danger of bugs. Liferay uses lots of well-known, widely tested components to minimize the likelihood of bugs creeping in. If you are interested, here are some of the well-known components and technologies Liferay uses—Apache ServiceMix, Mule, ehcache, Hibernate, ICEfaces, Java J2EE/JEE, jBPM, Activiti, JGroups, Alloy UI, Lucene, PHP, Ruby, Seam, Spring and AOP, Struts and Tiles, Tapestry, Velocity, and FreeMarker.
- Uses standard ways to communicate with other software: There are various standards established to share data between pieces of software. Liferay uses these so that you can easily get information from Liferay into other systems. The standards implemented by Liferay include AJAX, iCalendar and Microformat, JSR-168, JSR-127, JSR-170, JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0), JSR-314 (JSF 2.0), OpenSearch, the Open platform with support for web services, including JSON, Hessian, Burlap, REST, RMI, and WSRP, WebDAV, and CalDAV.
- Makes publication and collaboration tools Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) compliant: The new W3C recommendation is to make web content accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these. For example, the portal integrates CKEditor-standards support, such as W3C (WAI-AA and WCAG), 508 (Section 508).
- Alloy UI: The Liferay UI supports HTML 5, CSS 3, and Yahoo! User Interface Library 3 (YUI 3).
- Supports Apache Ant 1.8 and Maven 2: Liferay Portal can be built through Apache Ant by default, where you can build services; clean, compile, and build JavaScript CMD; build language native to ASCII, deploy, fast deploy; and so on. Moreover, Liferay supports Maven 2 SDK, providing Community Edition (CE) releases through public maven repositories as well as Enterprise Edition (EE) customers to install maven artifacts in their local maven repository.
- Bootstrap: Liferay 6.2 provides support for Twitter Bootstrap out of the box. With its fully responsive UI, the benefit of bootstrap is that it will support any device to render the content. Even content authors can use bootstrap markup and styles to make the content nicer.
Many of these standards are things that you will never need to know much about, so don't worry if you've never heard of them. Liferay is better for using them, but mostly, you won't even know they are there.
Other advantages of Liferay
Liferay isn't just for intranets! Users and developers are building all kinds of different websites and systems based on Liferay.
An intranet is great for collaboration and information sharing within a company. An extranet extends this facility to suppliers and customers, who usually log in over the Internet.
In many ways, this is similar to an intranet—however, there are a few technical differences. The main difference is that you create user accounts for people who are not part of your company.
Collaborative websites not only provide a secure and administrated framework, but they also empower users with collaborative tools, such as blogs, instant e-mail, message boards, instant messaging, shared calendars, and so on. Moreover, they encourage users to use other tools, such as tag administration, fine-grained permissions, delegable administrator privileges, enterprise taxonomy, and ad hoc user groups. By means of these tools, as an administrator, you can ultimately control what people can and cannot do in Liferay.
In many ways, this is similar to an intranet too; however, there are a few technical differences. The main difference is that you use collaborative tools simply, such as blogs, instant e-mail, message boards, instant messaging, shared calendars, and so on.
Content management and web publishing
You can also use Liferay to run your public company website with content management and web publishing.
Content management and web publishing are useful features in websites. It is a fact that the volume of digital content for any organization is increasing on a daily basis. Therefore, an effective CMS is a vital part of any organization. Meanwhile, document management is also useful and more effective when repositories have to be assigned to different departments and groups within the organization. Content management and document management are effective in Liferay. Moreover, when managing and publishing content, we may have to answer many questions, such as "who should be able to update and delete a document from the system?". Fortunately, Liferay's security and permissions model can satisfy the need for secure access and permissions and distinct roles (for example, writer, editor, designer, and administrator). Furthermore, Liferay integrates with the workflow engine. Thus, users can follow a flow to edit, approve, and publish content in the website.
Content management and web publishing are similar to an intranet; however, there are a few technical differences. The main difference is that you can manage content and publish web content smoothly.
Infrastructure portals integrate all possible functions, as we stated previously. This covers collaboration and information sharing within a company in the form of collaborative tools, content management, and web publishing. In infrastructure portals, users can create a unified interface to work with content, regardless of source via content interaction APIs. Furthermore, using the same API and the same interface as that of the built-in CMS, users can also manage content and publish web content from third-party systems, such as Alfresco, Vignette, Magnolia, FatWire, Microsoft SharePoint, and so on.
Infrastructure portals are similar to an intranet; there are a few technical differences though. The main difference is that you can use collaborative tools, manage content, publish web content, and integrate other systems in one place.
Why do you need a portal? The main reason is that a portal can serve as a framework to aggregate content and applications. A portal normally provides a secure and manageable framework where users can easily make new and existing enterprise applications available. In order to build an infrastructure portal smoothly, Liferay Portal provides an SOA-based framework to integrate third-party systems.
Out-of-the-box portlets and features
Liferay provides out-of-the-box (OOTB) portlets that have key features and can be used in the enterprise intranet very efficiently. These portlets are very scalable and powerful and provide the developer with the tools to customize it very easily.
Let's see some of the most frequently used portlets in Liferay Portal.
Content management is a common feature in any web-based portal or website:
- The Web Content portlet has the features of full web publishing, office integration, and the asset library, which contains documents, images, and videos. This portlet also has the structure and templates that help with the designing of the web content's look and feel. Structure can be designed with the help of a visual editor with drag and drop. It has the integrated help feature with tooltips to name the attributes of the fields. You will see more details in Chapter 9, Web Content Management.
- The Asset Publisher portlet provides you with the feature to select any type of content/asset, such as wiki pages, web content, calendar events, message board messages, documents, media documents, and many more. It also allows us to use filter on them by types, categories, tags, and sources. The display settings provide configurable settings, which helps the content to be displayed to the end users perfectly. In Chapter 4, Forums, Categorization, and Asset Publishing, you will see this in more detail.
- The Document and Media portlet is one of the most usable portlets to store any type of document. It allows you to store and manage your documents. It allows you to manage Liferay documents from your own machine's filesystem with the help of WebDAV integration. It has lots of new, built-in features, such as the inline document preview, image preview, and video player. Document metadata is displayed in document details, which makes it easier for you to review the metadata of the document. Also, Document and Media has features named checkin and checkout that helps editing the document in a group very easily. The Document and Media portlet has the multi-repository integration feature, which allows you to configure or mount any other repository very easily, such as SharePoint, Documentum, and Alfresco, utilizing the CMIS standard. In Chapter 8, Document and Media Management, you will come to know how to achieve such features in your corporate intranet.
Collaboration features are generally ways in which users communicate with each other, such as the ones shown in the following list:
- The Dynamic data list portlet provides you with the facility of not writing a single line of code to create the form or data list. Say, for example, your corporate intranet needs the job posting done on a daily basis by the HR administrator. The administrator needs to develop the custom portlet to fulfill that requirement. Now, the dynamic data list portlet will allow the administrator to create a form for job posting. It's very easy to create and display new data types. You will see more on this in Chapter 5, Understanding Wikis, Dynamic Data Lists, and Polls.
- The Blog portlet is one of the best features of Liferay. Blog portlets have two other related portlets, namely Recent Bloggers and Blogs Aggregator. The blog portlet provides the best possible ways for chronological publications of personal thoughts and web links in the intranet. Blog portlets can be placed for users of different sites/departments under the respective site//department page.
- The Calendar portlet provides the feature to create the event and schedule the event. It has many features that help the users in viewing the meeting schedule.
- The Message Board portlet is a full-featured forum solution with threaded views, categories, RSS capability, avatars, file attachments, previews, dynamic lists of recent posts, and forum statistics. Message Board portlets work with the fine-grained permissions and role-based access control model to give detailed levels of control to administrators and users. You will find more details about this in Chapter 4, Forums, Categorization, and Asset Publishing; you will see how to work on message boards.
- The Wiki portlet, like the Message Boards portlet, provides a straightforward wiki solution for both intranet and extranet portals that provides knowledge management among the users. It has all of the features you would expect in a state-of-the-art wiki. Again, it has the features of a file attachment preview, publishing the content, and versioning, and works with a fine-grained permission and role-based access control model. This again takes all the features of the Liferay platform. In Chapter 5, Understanding Wikis, Dynamic Data Lists, and Polls, you will find more about the Wiki portlet.
- The Social Activity portlet allows you to tweak the measurements used to calculate user involvement within a site. The contribution and participation values determine the reward value of an action. It uses the blog entry, wiki, and message board points to calculate the user involvement in the site.
- The Marketplace portlet is placed inside the control panel. It's a hub for the applications provided by Liferay and other partners. You can find that many applications are free, and for certain applications, you need to pay an amount. It's more like an app store. This feature was introduced in Liferay Version 6.1. In Chapter 10, Marketplace, Social Office, and Audience Targeting, it has been described in detail.
Note
In the Liferay 6.2 control panel, under the Apps | Store link section, you will see apps that are stored in the Marketplace portlet. Liferay 6.2 comes with a new control panel that is very easy to manage for the portal's Admin users. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 10, Marketplace, Social Office, and Audience Targeting. Liferay Sync is not a portlet; it's a new feature of Liferay that allows you to synchronize documents of Liferay Document and Media with your local system. Liferay provide the Liferay Sync application, which has to be installed in your local system or mobile device. In Chapter 8, Document and Media Management, you can see detailed examples of Liferay Sync.
RSS portlets provide RSS feeds. RSS portlets are used for the publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from their favorite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. A Liferay RSS portlet is fully customizable, and it allows you to set the URL from which site you would like to get feeds.
Activities portlets display portal-wide user activity, such as posting on message boards, creating wikis, and adding documents to Documents and Media. There are more portlets for social categories, such as User Statistics portlets, Group
Statistics portlets, and Requests portlets. All these portlets are used for the social media.
The Search portlet provides faceted search features. When a search is performed, facet information will appear based on the results of the search. The number of each asset type and the most frequently occurring tags and categories as well as their frequency will all appear in the left-hand side column of the portlet. It searches through Bookmarks, Blogs Entries, Web Content Articles, Document Library Files, Users, Message Board, and Wiki.
Finding more information on Liferay
In this chapter, we looked at what Liferay can do for your corporate intranet and briefly saw why it's a good choice.
If you want more background information on Liferay, the best place to start is the Liferay corporate website (http://www.liferay.com) itself. You can find the latest news and events, various training programs offered worldwide, presentations, demonstrations, and hosted trails. More interestingly, Liferay eats its own dog food; corporate websites within forums (called message boards), blogs, and wikis are built by Liferay using its own products. It is a real demo of Liferay Portal's software.
Liferay is 100 percent open source and all downloads are available from the Liferay Portal website at http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads/portal and the SourceForge website at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files. The source code repository is available at https://github.com/liferay.
The Liferay website's wiki (http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki) contains documentation, including a tutorial, user guide, developer guide, administrator guide, roadmap, and so on.
The Liferay website's discussion forums can be accessed at http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums and the blogs at http://www.liferay.com/community/blogs/highlighted. The official plugins and the community plugins are available at http://www.liferay.com/marketplace and are the best place to share your thoughts, get tips and tricks about Liferay implementation, and use and contribute community plugins.
If you would like to file a bug or know more about the fixes in a specific release, then you must visit the bug-tracking system at http://issues.liferay.com/.
This book will tell you more about a new trend in the portal world with respect to user needs, functionalities, and what we can achieve with the Liferay Portal 6.2 features.
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