This morning was devoted to setting up a Liferay development environment. Not too much new stuff for me but I got the change to figure out some small things which will probably be useful in the future.
After a pleasant lunch we are ready to write some code!
The weather in Frankfurt is much like the weather in Holland: rainy.
Today and the next 2 days I am going to increase my Liferay development skills in the city of Frankfurt. It is an official training by Liferay inc. I flew in Yesterday with my colleague Jeroen. I am writing this post from the class just like in the good old school days 
. There are about 20 other developers in this 3 day training.
I am really looking forward to learn some new tricks. I will keep you posted!
From the comfort of my own home, this is Bert Willems reporting on the Liferay and the future of portal development. I haven’t dreamed it up: this is a report of a Liferay webinar I just attended. Paul Hinz, Chief Marketing Officer of Liferay, Inc hosted the webinar. He talked about the role of open source software in enterprise as well as the vision Liferay has about the future of web, portal and social collaboration technologies.
He explained why a lot of things which portals have promised are actually unmet by today’s portals. Most notably is that portal development using the portlet API is hard when compared to develop decentralized applications in for example PHP or Ruby. The learning curve of Java and it’s technology stack is considerably longer compared to other web application frameworks. Due to this fact other frameworks made their way into the enterprise.
He then elaborated on the evolved focus of portals and other web applications: providing a centralized platform for end user to create, share and develop knowledge. This is not something new because it is all around us already. Take a look at LinkedIn for example: I can add this very WordPress blog to my LinkedIn profile and the same goes for my Twitter account; LinkedIn acts as a portal.
Paul envisions that users will developing applications and share them in the same way the develop content together now in the Wikipedia. The focus of technology providers like Liferay will be on facilitating these user developers. A good example here is Apples iPhone with its countless available user build applications.
The focus of the Liferay development team for 2010 is:
Notice to focus on facilitation and easy of extension rather then providing new features.
This is, in my humble opinion, a positive paradigm shift from classic wisdom owners (fortune 500 companies, patent holders, publishers, standards committees etc.) to wisdom of the crowd. Why shouldn’t we use the collective knowledge in all of our minds and combine it in a productive way so we can solve problems together? I see this shift in the software development world (see the microformats opposed to standardization committees like W3C and JCP) for example but also in the publishing industry (Wikipedia anyone?). There is a lot more to say about this subject but I will save that for a later post. Bye for now.
Welcome to the second article in a series of articles on Liferay. In this series I will show you various aspects of Liferay, Liferay installation, Liferay maintenance and Liferay development so lets get started. These articles assume that you have basic Java development skills.
In this post I will show you how to configure Liferay to use MySQL instead of Hypersonic. I assume you have followed all the steps in the previous post or that you are using a JNDI datasource. I also assume that you have installed MySQL on your system already. If not, please install it first. If the portal is still running stop it first before continuing with the next steps.
Welcome to the first article in a series of articles on Liferay. In this series I will show you various aspects of Liferay, Liferay installation, Liferay maintenance and Liferay development so lets get started. These articles assume that you have basic Java development skills.
In this post I will show you how to install Liferay 5.2.3, the latest communitie edition, on your local machine in the JBoss 5.1 application server, I assume you have a Windows machine. If you are running a different OS you can take the same steps but some paths will change depending on your OS. There are quite a few steps that need to be taken in order to set up Liferay, I will go through each and every step in detail. Read the rest of this entry »
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!
