Hello all, sorry for the radio silence lately, you might wonder what I have been doing lately. Well I have committed a terrible sin against the .NET framework (my previous home ): I started learning Java.

Why Java? Because several clients of Liones demand that their applications must be build on the Java platform and I am deeply involved in the process. I am not going to bother you with the organizational side of the process, I will focus on sharing my experience.

Learning Java isn’t really the objective for me, it is just another programming language and C# is similar enough to not cause any problems for me to program in Java. The real objective is to be able to develop applications (called portlets) for the Liferay portal framework. The hidden challenge, for me, turned out to be setting up the environment.

I got everything up and running today: Java, Ant, Tomcat, Liferay and I developed my first custom portlet (an application for Liferay) using above technologies and Java Server Faces. I will post an article on how I did it soon!