Review of Liferay Open Source Enterprise Portal

 Overview:

Liferay is a leading Collaborative as well as Intranet open source Portals solutions system that comes with many other applications. You can design your enterprise potal with this software as per your choice. It supports the portal development standard JSR 168 and 286. You can further build your application with Java, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, JSF  on the top of this.

 The software comes with the support of 14 different application servers like WebLogic, WebSphere, Tomcat, JBoss, Oracle AS  etc. The product Liferay Portal is divided into three parts a> Liferay Portal, b> Liferay CMS 3> Liferay collaboration suite. The installation process is simple. You can download Liferay software with Apache Tomcat. The software comes with HSQL database. In order to use it with mySql and Oracle, you have to change the configuration little bit.

Architecture:

Liferay incorporates SOA design features. It extends other framework to use Liferay for enterprise application. The Enterprise Service Bus, ESB is a central connection manager that offers applications and services to be added quickly to an enterprise’s infrastructure. The other core design principle is the support for web services and that helps different applications in your enterprise to communicate with each other. You can use Java, .NET  etc because the web services use XML standard.

Also, smart page caching increases the web performance. Liferay is considered a very secure platform because it provides strong encryption including advanced algorithms such as DES, MD5 and RSA. The other design feature includes Hardware/Software Load Balancing, HTTP Failover, Session Replication, and Distributed Cache (using Lightweight Multicast Protocol).

Features:

The remaining core feature includes:

• Liferay CMS comes with different portlet applications like Document Library, Web Content (previously known as Journal Portlet), Image Gallery, XML Content, Asset Publishers, etc. They provide the functionalities of Document Management as well as Web Content Management.
• The software also incorporates multi-language support. Currently, it supports 22 languages and it is easy to switch between languages by clicking a mouse. You can also add new language at your choice.
• Single sign-on allows end-users to log-in just once to access the system. After signing in, it allows you to customize and gives access control to users and add-on functionalities.
• You can use drag and drop feature to move elements from one place to other place in the portlet.
• You can cluster Liferay portal in multiple tiers like presentation, service, business logic, and database.
• Collaboration is one of the most widely used and crucial feature for Liferay Portal. Based upon “Organization” and “Communities” hierarchy, users can  collaborate using different out the box portlets like Wikis, Message Boards, Blogs, Email, Calendar, Polls, Announcements & Alerts, Bookmarks, directory, invitations etc.