I think an open source project’s licensing has a ying/yang relationship with its community.
There are a lot of worthy contributors who would stay away from a project if they don’t like the license. So this affects how fast and in what ways the community around a project grows.

Another way to think about it is that license is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a vibrant community.

Leadership is more important to manage how and when people leave. In other words, the itch to make it better makes them come to project, good leadership keeps them there.

I’m not sure how much PHP is exposed in Liferay but it’s based on Quercus PHP which is a full PHP 5 implementation written in Java. Quercus PHP is awesome if you ask me. It doesn’t support every last feature — but most are supported.

Not sure about any other languages, but with support of PHP? it really SUCKS!.

All thru out the day I was in
the community forum, and trying to figure out, what? how? and why?

Many PHP questions were given answers that of which can’t be exactly called an “answer”, others were never answered at all.

Saying that it supports was just for marketing, I guess… other non-java web developers won’t appreciate something like this from an open-source view.

Thanks for the summary. I am especially happy that Alfresco will consolidate the AVM and DM repositories in favor of DM to eliminate the need to write cross repository copy actions.

Kind regards,

Bas Peters

Thanks for the summary. It’s great to see that Alfresco continues its great technical direction.

I am especially happy to see Alfresco releasing Surf / Web Sripts through ASF - something I’ve advocated in the past. And moving to CMIS having ASRs based on DM will really make the stack much more consistent.

Cheers,

Jean

I spend around 2 days figuring out how theming works and layout templating and seriously, creating two war files to make theme is just way off. ANY non technical person should beable to create a theme in there favorite CMS. TYPO3 provides the excellent Templavoila system as an example. You just get a template, map it in TYPO3 and off you go. you don’t need to put ANY markers, engines or what not in it. If you get a new template from teh designer (given that the ID’s are the same) you just drop it in a folder and your website will use that! Also the fact that a template is full with portal rubbish like application.css, portlet.css, wiki images , progress bar images etc etc…

When I try to look at it from a users perspective the screens in liferay looks messy and un-organized.

Form and presentation is quite nice for people that don’t know, it allows you to define a custom way to present specific content.

When looking for a scripting language, I don’t see anything in there, at least not by default, items like menu rendering is not in Liferay. It has some items like ‘Navigation’ But doesn’t allow you to decide WHAT should be in the navigation.

What I really don’t like is how content is edited IN the web-page currently for a designer this means you need to make much more CSS so it looks presentable. By default it looks horrible.

Currently I give Liferay still a change, but if you say TYPO3 has a steep learning curve, then better get double ready for Liferay!

Ries

Thanks !

Warm Regards,
Ruben.

First I think the point of the post was that Liferay is much more than a portal. It’s a soup-to-nuts framework. It comes with scaffolding capability for creating database-driven applications, UI capabilities and many out of the box services. Some of these capabilities are stronger than others. I think there is little question that if you need to build an application that requires the kind of social frameworks and other services as well as the application aggregation that a portal provides, the Liferay framework is going to give you a very big boost in productivity.

On the subject of built-in portlets and the use of scriptlets: over time Liferay has built up its tag libraries and most recently, its use of client side UI based on JQuery. JSP based applications seems to be a preferred approach at Liferay but use of tag libs is definitely a best practice. There are portlets that have a lot of scriplets in them and I agree with you that it’s not ideal. My sense is that this is not the approach going forward.
With respect to the Dependency Injection concern, I’m note sure I follow how the static methods making debugging harder. The class loader proxies is not something I am a huge fan of and I would agree that they can make debugging more difficult — that is however a separate issue from the static method approach. Although Liferay uses Spring under the hood (which supports setter and constructor injection,) the IoC (inversion of control) pattern Liferay uses in their framework is more akin to a Service Registry (but without the lookup step.)
If I had to point to an issue here, it would be that the static method based services sort of imply that there is one service implementation that meets the service interface. Some might think that in practical terms this is generally the case anyway but I disagree. I think you want to either use setter injection or a registry that allows you to get after more than one implementation. Long story short. I don’t think what Liferay is doing is “Wrong.” It doesn’t use Spring the way many projects do but this is mainly due to the fact that Liferay pre-dates Spring’s dominance. Also, it’s important to note that there is a lot of re-factoring in this area of Liferay still in play.
On documentation, I think the Service Builder methods should have more. Service Builder does allow you to add comments to many of the files it creates - and that capability should be used.

I hope to convey the sense here that we’re not just blogging for marketing effect. We’re not going to say that every last thing about Liferay is perfect. But let’s face it… no project is perfect. The best you can hope for is that the project is a) useful and, b) actively making progress. Brian Chan and Co. at Liferay work as hard as anyone I know at making their platform better with each release. IMO there is no doubt that Liferay can deliver value and that it can save you time and money. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with Liferay. It’s not the right framework for every need — and that’s the key. Liferay has a lot of features that tend to draw folks in. You need to ask hard questions about what you’re trying to do and what you actually need — and then go with the framework that gets you there with the right balance of time, cost, and runway.

-R