Now our team is facing new project - creation of new company's intranet portal. Because of some reasons we are considering java open source portals and deciding between Liferay and GateIn.
One of very important requirements is following: portal representation for users must depend on country/language settings of customer computer, it means not only portlets localization but users in US subsidiaries of the company should see probably other structure than users in France.
Is it possible to implement the requirement in Liferay and GateIn?.
This can definitely be achieved through Liferay. Please have a look at the concepts of creating organisations.
Am not sure if this can be done in GateIn. However, there are many other things that you may need to keep in mind before choosing these Portals. I have tried to mention few of them here.
1. Check the stability of the Portal server that you will choose to run on a particular Container. GateIn initially was unstable.
2. You may have to override few files (for your customization) if required. GateIn uses GTMPL view technology for the same. Check how good are you in this. In this case, Liferay is easier (Liferay doesn't use any GTMPL UI framework)
3. Apart from developing a location based Portal, if you are also trying to achieve other things like fully Ajax based pages, a good UI framework (like JSF) etc then check if the Portal server you are choosing runs on a particular Container which supports Ajax, JSF (latest versions)
Above were few and list may grow. But, to conclude I would suggest to go for Liferay :)
This can be achieved with Gatein at different level :
Sites : you can declare multiple sites running on the same portal instance(sharing same User Base). In this case you can automatically redirect user to different country sites, based on the country/language of the user.
Sites Navigations : Gatein provides portal, group and user navigations. Navigation is created dynamically when a user connects to the portal. You can have only websites, navigation will created dynamically by user (based on group and user permissions).
Pages (Dynamics layout rendering): GateIn renders each page dynamically. A page is composed of multiple containers that contains portlets or gadgets.
By setting permissions on each container and by using User Group or Membership of the connected user, it's possible to have different page layout.
Of course, you can also mixed these 3 approaches to build your portal.
Liferay is very buggy, and community is very bad. Unless you pay the support.
GateIn promises much, but still lacks functionality.
You may consider JBoss Juzu and Apache Struts to develop generic portlets in order to void any portal vendor lock-in.
Struts provides features of internationalization, localization, timezones achieve my project.
I make use of struts2-portlet plugin to achieve a reporting portlet running on multiple portals. Here is my sample: code.google.com/p/jasperrocks/wiki/Features
Related
When a user logs into the Liferay Portal I want to show a visualization of the list of files that they have access to. This visualization would be done using Javascript, but preferably not inside a portlet, but just being run on the Portal homepage.
I was looking into some of the JSON web service examples, but I was a bit confused on how to invoke some of the Liferay remote services to access the document files from an application that doesn't extend the Liferay portlet class.
Is this possible to do this from outside a portlet or would I need to implement something using URL parameters as referred in one of the Liferay examples? I don't know there is something I'm not understanding here.
EDIT: I want to implement these remote service requests for the visualization inside of a custom theme that I am using. Yet, due to Olaf's recommendation, I will look to see if implementing my visualization and service requests inside of a portlet would be a better solution to my needs.
Yes, it's possible. I'm not sure what you mean with "not inside a portlet, but just being run on the portal homepage" - typically everything that's displayed on the UI is encapsulated within a portlet (well, or within the theme - but for maintainability reasons I'd keep it out of the theme)
You'll need the p_auth token - how to obtain it is part of the documentation that you link (or the surrounding chapters)
If you run into specific problems, please edit your question and list them (and your code). Currently your question reads "Is this possible...?" and the answer to this is "Yes".
Recently i've started learning hybris and come across these two terms.I feel both are same because they both are related to User Interface.
somebody please help me understand how backoffice and cockpit are different.
Since Hybris 6, Backoffice is the new more generic UI for managing your Hybris Store. This is the successor of HMC. (Hybris Management Console) Cockpits will become deprecated in a few versions. Using them, you have to handle several different extensions (Product Cockpit, Customer Service Cockpit, CMS Cockpit etc..), which use different frameworks and styles.
The main idea of having different cockpits is to separate different dedicated teams and concerns. Also they have some customizations, which are much more usable, than HMC. With Backoffice, you can create the same functionality with different modules.
In general, if you start a new shop, i would recommend using the Backoffice. This is the new way to administrate you shop.
backoffice is a new framework which is a replacement for old cockpits.
backoffice advantages:
the new architecture allows developer to focus and spend more time on important things (application logic) instead of all secondary tasks (e.g. security - authentication and authorization, notifications etc.)
it offers a lot of standard reusable components so you can create new applications faster (from ready blocks):
actions: create, delete, search etc.
editors: decimal editor, text editor, reference editor etc.
widgets: collection browser, border layout, explorer tree etc.
your applications will be more consistent and intuitive, because they use the same components
it groups applications in one place, so the client does not need to know many URLs (he can open one application and everything will be in one place)
I have been using Liferay for work for 2 weeks. I noticed that it's a bit difficult to find good documentation and tutorials.
Until now I created pages from the web portal. After I create them, I drag and drop portlets. I don't really like this approach, I would prefer to use a coding approach. Is there a way to create a website or page programmatically by defining a project as I do to create portlets?
Moreover, I am using Liferay with WebLogic 10.3.6. I want to know where liferay puts pages I created via web-portal on the file system. I suppose that a file, or something similar, is created when I declare a new site on the Liferay web-portal.
Thank you all,
Marco
Yes Liferay has it's Database, all data of any Liferay object is stored in the database and / or on the file system depending on your configuration.
However, one of the functionality of Liferay is to let you create pages / sites through the UI. As documented in the Java Portal Specification and Liferay Server Documents your approach to create pages in an alternative way is possible but it is part of Liferay's Portal Services. You can use Liferay's Service (HTTP REST) API to call the related service. To access those APIs you need to configure your Liferay Server.
In case you want to do programmatically you still need to configure, enable and call those external HTTP services from your code. You should not create Liferay Objects from your own code hosted as an extension inside your Liferay Instance as that will result inconsistency in your Liferay Database / filesystem. (As in case of page creation Liferay creates a set of other related objects in it's database / filesystem.)
In your liferay bundle you will find two plugins of interest.
First is resources-importer-web for which description says
The Resources Importer app allows front-end developers to package web
content, portlet configurations, and layouts together in a theme
without saving it as a compiled .LAR file thereby allowing for greater
flexibility in its usage between Liferay Portal versions.This app will automatically create associated content when other
plugins are deployed that are configured to make use of the Resource
Importer app.This app installs as a Liferay service.
Second is welcome-theme which declares resources to be created by resources-importer-web. This on should be example how to create your own. Take a look at
welcome-theme\WEB-INF\src\resources-importer\*
welcome-theme\WEB-INF\liferay-plugin-package.properties
This feature is described at importing-resources-with-themes
As mentioned by gabor_the_kid, Liferay stores all objects in its tables. For example, User related objects would be in user table. Liferay exposed services or API's to change the default/to add new behaviors by program but not easier than achieving it through UI. Also maintenance should be considered for going program way of creating pages or layouts etc.
You can describe your changes using xml and use the Liferay Portal DB Setup core to create the changes in DB.
The library defines the list of available xml configurations.
First of all, let me tell you what I am or my company is intended to do. We have already developed a project using Java, JSP and Servlet. We want it to integrate with Liferay so that we can change logo, css, images, themes or any other UI related component at run time using Liferay admin panel. But backend should be what we have developed.
In short, the UI of our project is controlled by Liferay, but control of data displayed on UI or submitted from UI should be from our developed backend code.
Now I have a few questions regarding above said approach of fulfilling the requirement:
What we are trying to do is possible?
Is this approach recommendable for what we intended to do?
Or do we need to develop our project from scratch to fit into Liferay? Like developing portlets and deploying in Liferay or other approach that has been given in Liferay documentation.
What about database integration? We have around 15 columns/fields in user table in database of our project which is completely different from that of Liferay's user table.
Liferay is a very new for us. We have checked the documentation section of Liferay but still few things like above said requirements and its implementation is not clear. Also, we would like to know in what scenarios/requirements Liferay is useful.
Ok let me try to answer your question point-wise and I would answer your last question first, which should automatically clear other questions:
Q. Also, we would like to know in what scenarios/requirements Liferay is useful.
This can have a very wide answer, but I have made it shorter for you:
If your site is content heavy and not data heavy then go for Portal
If you plan to use only a single web-application in a portal then I would suggest standalone custom developed web-application is much better.
I agree liferay portal will give you lot of things out-of-box like Single Sign-on, authorization, authentication, friendly-url and page creation and also lot of applications like Blogs, Wikis, Document library, some social networking apps etc. But think about it, do you really need all this? if not, then this is overkill
Here are some really nice links to better understand a portal's usage:
When to use a portal
Why to use portal technology
liferay tag wiki: It has nice description as to what is liferay and it also contains relevant links to Admin guide which will tell you what all functionalities liferay has and how you can manage it.
So still if you find your other questions unanswered, read-on ...
Q1. What we are trying to do is possible?
Nope. Portlet technology is different from Servlet technology. Liferay (or anyother portal) does not provide a way (atleast a simple one) to integrate servlets that would render pages inside a portal. For eg: Since with servlet you define URL mappings for a particular servlets before-hand in a web.xml but in a portal the URLs are generated by the Portlet Container. So portals work with portlets and not Servlets.
Q2. Is this approach recommendable for what we intended to do?
Nope. As I already explained in Q1.
Q3. Or do we need to develop our project from scratch to fit into Liferay? Like developing portlets and deploying in Liferay or other approach that has been given in Liferay documentation.
If you want to go the liferay way then Yes.
If you want to build applications that talk to your custom tables then portlets are the way to go.
Q4. What about database integration? We have around 15 columns/fields in user table in database of our project which is completely different from that of Liferay's user table.
If you go with Liferay. In this scenario you can create a combination of liferay-hook & portlet (may be using service-builder) to customize liferay's User creation mechanism and there by store data in both Liferay's User table and your custom tables.
Liferay's permission system is really fine-grained so you can also benefit from this system and put permission even on the data level.
In conclusion I would say:
Everything boils down to what your requirements are and what resources you have. And sometimes what future requirements you can have.
Note: All the terms used in this answer which are specific to liferay (like service-builder, hook etc) are explained in the liferay tag wiki.
Hope this helps. If you would like to know anything specific I would gladly update my answer.
I have only recently started using Liferay 6.0. I have downloaded liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.4_1 community edition.
First of all can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0? (The ones available on the Internet are for earlier versions...)
Secondly. I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?
Lastly, could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?
Thanks.
To work through Liferay internals is really tough but it's not impossible. There's no main source of documentation and people has to google around and forget things very easily without possibility to get back to the original source...
Organizations can form hierarchies as real organizations would.
Communities has similar role as organizations but from a different point of view.
The main difference consists in :
persistence - persists in time in
contrast to communities which appears
and disappears
administration - users “belong”
to an organization which means that
the the admin of an organization is
able to edit his profile. On the other
hand users “join” a community which
means that the community admin can
only manage the membership.
Relationship - organizations can
form a hierarchy while communities are
independent of each other
membership - users “must” belong
to an organization while joining a
community is optional
User groups - Unlike organizations and locations, user groups have no context associated with them. They are purely a convenience grouping that aids administrators in assigning permissions and roles to a group of users instead of individual users or assigning a group of users to a community.
Roles define permissions across the portal, an organization or across a community. There are functions like creation of a thread in a discussion forum. Problem is that there are forums across scopes like community, organization or the entire portal. So that portal role grants access to creation of a new thread in each and every discussion forum and community role just within a particular community.
I'm also a Liferay newbie but here's the general structure of Liferay in case someone is interested.
Organizations are a portal administrator mandated hierarchy. Organizations may have sub organizations that are administered by organization administrators in each organization. Each organization can have it's own pages.
Communities are like organizations but can't have sub communities and non-administrator users may be allowed to create them. Each community can have it's own pages.
Users are registered users who may have their own pages and may belong to any number of organizations and/or communities.
Pages are web pages that users with certain permissions can edit simply by selecting a predefined layout and adding/removing portlets and sub-pages.
Portlet is a web application that usually "runs" as part of a page in it's own window like container.
can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0?
Our liferay tag is a good place to start with. It contains all the relevant information about some useful websites and also some good books suggestion. And it is continually being updated.
I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?
Unlike for previous versions, the user-guide is really a good place to know some basic administration concepts like these.
could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?
I don't know exactly what you want or what is the requirement to do this, but giving <input type="file" /> would open the file browser to select a file or else you can use flash to achieve this or construct a link like Click to pen local folder - but this only works for windows and it opens the folder structure inside the browser itself and with IE it opens the Windows explorer.
Now, you can access Liferay documentation to learn more about liferay. Starting from v6.1 there are no communities. Now it has organizations and sites.
As far as I know, currently there is only one book for Liferay 6, from Jonas Yuan:
http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/liferay-book:-liferay-portal-6-enterprise-intranets