Liferay - An Introduction
- Posted by Joshua on November 8th, 2007 filed in Ajax, Business, Technology
PowWeb’s old Web Master Nate flew into town for a conference recently where he and I had an opportunity to catch up and talk tech for few days. It was a really good time and as is usual when I hang out with Nate, I walked away with new and *fascinating* knowledge. One of the new things I’ll share now. The other I’ll share later since the coding is going to take a bit of prep-work.
Liferay
Nate now works for a company called Liferay which makes a phenomenal open source portal for managing enterprise-level Web sites. I’ve got to tell you, it’s a pretty impressive product. After playing with the demo, I can see why governments, museums, and colleges worldwide are jumping on the bandwagon.
The company itself is based out of California and takes a strong stance on staying true to the spirit of Open Source. In addition, Liferay donates a percentage of it’s profits each month to a “worthy cause” chosen by it’s employees. Businesses involved in the Open Source community know how incredibly difficult it is to develop and sell an Open Source product without keeping some aspects of their product proprietary. Liferay seems to defeat this obstacle by building their business on a bedrock of Open Source and philanthropic philosophy.
My biggest complaint about the portal is the amount of resources it takes to operate the application. Because Liferay is in many ways a WebOS, it’s pretty heavy on javascript. IE7 nearly fainted and FireFox asked me if I wanted to wait for the javascript to load, debug it, or stop it. The UI is great. Each piece of core functionality is broken down into draggable widget-like boxes which then have tabs for accessing further functionality. It’s not unlike a windows environment when you open up the properties of a file. You are presented with a dialog box with different tabs at the top. Though the UI is great and intuitive, when clicking from tab to tab, you have to wait for the page to re-load. The way it is setup almost implies that the content loaded by switching from tab to tab will be done inline ala ajax. I’m told that may change in the near future.
Downside to LifeRay? It’s written in Java and it’s meant for Enterprise-level companies which means it won’t work at PowWeb. But! If you’re looking for an example of how to layout a complex interface for your next big web app., Liferay has it. Good UI is something all PowWeb-hosted designers should care about.
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