Introduction

Liferay is the market's leading provider of open source portal solutions. It provides a solid platform to serve our site to all clients. It is difficult to say what Liferay is. On the one hand, Liferay is a great content-management system, but on the other hand, it provides many tools for collaboration and communication between users. It can also be a social platform with many functionalities, such as wall, message board, chat, and many others. Furthermore, it is a portlet container that is JSR-168 and JSR-286 compliant. Java Specification Requests (JSRs) describes final specifications for the Java platform. A portlet is a small web application that produces fragments of HTML code that are aggregated into a portal. JSR-168 and JSR-286 specifications standardize how portlets interact with portlet containers. These specifications also describe a standard application programming interface for Java portlet development. In other words, Liferay is only responsible for aggregating the set of portlets that are to appear on any particular page. This approach gives users a great tool to organize and customize portlets in order to build whole portals, social platforms, or intranets. Within Liferay, a portal is composed of a number of portlets, which are self-contained interactive elements that are written to a particular standard. A number of publications describe Liferay's advantages. In this book, we will try to delve deeper into Liferay's architecture and its functionalities.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to give you an insight about Liferay's installation and management with basic configuration. We realize that there are many ways to download, compile, install, and run Liferay Portal. Our main purpose is to provide some clear and basic information about the starting package on which we will rely and work. This chapter explains the main processes that are performed on every compiling action or on every startup action.

Liferay Portal is distributed in two different editions:

This book is based on the Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) version with the newest release, which is 6.2.

To start the journey with Liferay, there are a few starting points that contain a lot of useful information, which are as follows: