“Liferay Enterprise Portal.”  Sure, Liferay packs all the features that make it a strong “Portal.”  In partnership with Sun, Liferay has a large and experienced team behind their portal capabilities including their implementation of the latest JSR-286 portlet specification / industry standard.

The JSR-286, for its part expands the existing portlet specification in meaningful ways:

• Portlet filters
• Portlet Event support
• Public Render Parameters
• Resource serving

With the strength of its support for the portlet specification one might be tempted to think of Liferay as “just another portal.”  That classification would be misguided. 

Liferay is a platform and a framework for developing collaborative and social applications and services.  Portal is just the mechanism for aggregating and distributing these capabilities.

At the heart of Liferay is a service oriented architecture. Liferay ships with a host of out-of-the-box services for creating collaborative applications.  To cite a few (but not all) examples:

• Profile Service
• Search Services
• Group Services
• Calendar Service
• Friend Services
• Activity Services
• Forum Services
• Blog Services
• Rating Services
• Tagging Services

If the out of the box services do not provide the functionality coverage you’re application requires or you need to create your own domain specific or composite services; Liferay provides a capability called Service Builder.  Service builder makes it very easy to create services.  With the modification of a simple XML file and the execution of a code generation script you can quickly create all the basic plumbing for your services.  If you need persistence, all the Hibernate work is created for you.  If your service needs to be remoted through interfaces like SOAP, all that plumbing can be generated for that as well.  The only code you need to write is the code that is custom to your service.  All the machinery is quickly taken care of by Liferay; the framework.

Liferay makes use of Hibernate to handle data persistence.  Service builder does all the work of configuring and coding against Hibernate for you making this somewhat transparent to you.  There is real world value here. You deal directly with your model not low level JDBC code.  You can configure read / write separation (a special thanks to a community contribution for this. – community matters) and your application is immediately enabled for several mainstream / popular relational databases.

In addition to a rich services framework, Liferay also enables application developers with powerful eventing and lifecycle capabilities called Hooks.  Applications can register to receive and act upon portal and portlet start up and shutdown events, user activities, persistence level CRUD (create, read, update, delete) events, CMS activities and many other out of the box events.  It’s also possible for applications to register and fire their own events for consumption by sibling applications.

To support your presentation tier Liferay has developed a host of tag libraries that work in concert with standard tag libraries.  This makes it very easy to create standards based, lightweight presentations on top of your application and services code.  In addition to server side libraries, Liferay is designed to work extremely well with JQuery, a leading JavaScript / AJAX library for rich application UIs.  The Liferay team even hired a JQuery committer in order to drive home the integration and to help emphasize the importance of strong user experience and quality of UI within the platform.

Is Liferay a Portal?  Yes of course it is.  Liferay has a strong implementation of the industry standards and is the most popular open source JSR-286 portal in the space today. However Liferay is much, much more.  If you need to build a collaborative or social application: Liferay takes care of all the boilerplate coding and provides the fundamental capabilities out-of-the-box allowing you to focus your time, attention and money on your business problem. 

Red Hat and Microsoft?? Working together??? Yes, you heard correctly. The two leading and competing providers of operating environments deployed by enterprises are coming together due to customer demand.

Red Hat announced recently that it has “signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft Corporation to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualization platforms”.

“Each company will join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers. The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualized Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence.”

“The key components of the reciprocal agreements are:

• Red Hat will validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies.
• Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux server guests to be supported on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
• Once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server operating system virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.”

More information can be found at www.redhat.com/promo/svvp.

This just goes to show that Red Hat and Microsoft CAN work together under one roof, or at least one virtualized environment…….

We’ve all seen social networking’s unrelenting growth over the past few years as it continues to gain popularity and user adoption by enabling users to connect with people all over the world. Just look at Facebook’s road to domination. But along with that growth also comes a change in the way it’s being used. More and more, people are starting to leverage the power of social networking, this time, for a good cause.

On February 12, 2009, the first ever Twestival brought together the Twitter community in 202 cities around the world. The cause? A fundraising and awareness raising event for charity:water, a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. For one evening, social networking became a real life presence as local Twitter communities gathered offline for this global event.

“Twestival was born out of the idea that if cities were able to collaborate on an international scale, but working from a local level, it could have a spectacular impact.

We all know that Twitter can be a powerful communications tool. It can connect, mobilize and inform people around the world instantly. Those of us on Twitter know of its ability to organically create interesting communities from those people who find and follow each other. It is proven from the first Twestival that bringing the Twittersphere together for a special event is not only a memorable night; it has momentum to bring about social change.”

The first ever Twestival demonstrated the powerful impact social networking can make. This 100% volunteer organized event raised over $40,000 to support charity:water projects. Not bad for a first-of-its-kind event. The magnitude of this event opens the gateway for future events where individuals can make a difference on a global scale.

We just completed the first phase of a major open source content management implementation for Harvard Business Publishing. Using leading open source software that included Alfresco and JBoss, we helped launch two new sites — the online edition of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, and Harvard Business Digital at harvardbusiness.org.

In a note to their visitors, Eric Hellweg, Editorial Managing Editor of HarvardBusiness.org, highlighted some of the new site features:

“At HarvardBusiness.org, here are some of the new elements:

A sharper focus on the topics you care most about. You’ve told us a lot in the last couple years and have helped us hone our editorial focus on the topics of most interest to you. You’ll find expanded coverage in the core areas of Leadership, Strategy, Innovation, and a new section we’re calling “You at Work,” that will help you advance your ideas, your career, and your team.

Easier navigation through our full range of product offerings. We’ve organized the site with a more intuitive layout so that you will be able to see more of what we are creating on a daily basis. The new design makes it easier to access all of our offerings at Harvard Business Publishing including books, expert voices, interactive tools, case studies, video interviews, and podcasts.

Faster and more comprehensive search. Our new search functionality should allow you to find what you want a lot faster and more intuitively than before. By placing the search field front and center with an additional drop down menu we’ve streamlined the ability to narrow your search, eliminating a couple clicks.

Richer graphics. We’ve created room for richer graphics on the site that we hope will bring out the human element found in most management ideas.

Here’s what’s new at HBR.org:

Easier, faster access to more content. The “shuffle deck” navigation and “Current Issue” index front and center on the home page should make it easier to navigate the site and discover the content that’s most useful to you. Improved search functionality and new article collections will make it easier to tap into HBR’s 2,500 + digital article archive and new interactive elements.

More up-to-date content. You’ll see more timely and frequent updates to the site that will help you apply HBR concepts to your daily business and management challenges. Regular perspectives from the HBR Editors’ Blog, podcasts, and videos will help you stay current–even when you’re short on time.

New features to help you use HBR ideas more effectively. In the redesigned article pages, you’ll find In Brief summaries that help you grasp key ideas quickly and apply them in your own company or career. Interactive tools and video interviews give additional perspective and guidance.”

In the months ahead, we plan on rolling out additional improvements to both HarvardBusiness.org and HBR.org. These will include a streamlined shopping and checkout process, a further enhanced search, community offerings, and more.

Another major victory for enterprise-grade, commercial open source software.

JBoss just announced the JBoss Migration Assistance program, of which we’re a founding partner. The primary goal of the project is to provide a collection of open source tools and resources that will enable enterprises to more easily migrate from closed source, proprietary application servers to open source JBoss platforms. We’re happy to bring our experience with application and portal migration to this new JBoss.org project.

As Matt Asay points out, this is a community effort that will combine Red Hat’s efforts with that of its most experienced JBoss system integrators, as no one tool or process can cover the gamut of app server/portal/content migration. This type of communtiy effort represents the essence of collaborative open source development.