Introduction to Liferay Portal

What is a Liferay Portal?

Liferay is open source Portal software and it has a free community edition for commercial use. Liferay is an enterprise web platform to build the business solutions.

Liferay comes in two versions:

1. Community Edition
2. Enterprise Edition

Liferay Portal is one of the most successful and top Portals available in the present day’s market for developing a website / web application. This portal is made up of hot-deployable plugins called Portlets.  Portlets form the heart of a Portal.

Following are the benefits of using a Liferay portal:

• Liferay is open source software
• Web Content Management
• Document Management
• Digital asset management
• Workflow management
• Social collaboration suite (Wikis, Blogs, etc.)
• Supports integration with LDAP
• Support for Hot deployable plugins, etc.

Features of Liferay Portal:

Following are a few features of Liferay Portal:

• Runs on most of the application servers and servlet containers, databases, and operating systems.
• JSR-286 Compliant.
• 60 portlets pre-bundled Out-of-the-box.
• Built in Content Management System (CMS) and Collaboration Suite
• Hot deployable plugins, hence no restart of server required for changes.
• Personalization of Pages for users.

Introduction to Portals

What is a Portal?

A portal is generally defined as a software platform for building websites and web applications. A portal is a web application that commonly provides personalization, single sign on, content aggregation from different sources, and hosts the presentation layer of information systems. Aggregation is the act of integrating content from different sources within a web page. Present day portals have added many features which help the editors to implement various functionalities from a single platform. The below listed various features are available in the modern day’s portals:

• Web Content management
• Document management
• Digital asset management
• Workflow management
• Social collaboration (Communities), etc.

These features are making Portals as one of the best options to be chosen while building a web application / websites.

Portal functionality can be divided into three main parts:

1. Portlet container: A portlet container is very similar to a servlet container. A portlet container is responsible for initializing and destroying portlets and also for passing user requests to it and collecting responses. It controls the life cycle of the portlet.
2. Content aggregator: The main job of a portal is to aggregate content generated by various portlets.
3. Common services:  The common services that you can find in most implementations are:

• Single sign on: This helps us to get access to all the applications that are deployed in the Portal, once we log into the portal server
• Personalization:This helps the user to customize his page, so that he can view the applications which he is interested.