Recently a client asked about the differences between Liferay and social community products. Great question! Here are some points based on our work with customers. Social community products are narrowly focused and track social interactions well, but do not provide the breadth and depth that Liferay does from a web platform perspective. This results in situations where social...
Read More About Comparing Liferay and social community products »

Twitter is now ubiquitous in the social landscape. More and more organizations are showing twitter feeds in their external facing sites. In a recent project, I was tasked with the integration of Twitter tweets into an Enterprise Portal. In this blog post, I am going to walk through the steps for installing and setting up the twitter portlet from the Liferay Marketplace. As you explore the...
Read More About Tweet! Tweet! Need to Integrate Twitter feeds into Liferay? »

In this post (my second post in a series on Elastic Search and Liferay) we are going to see how to  install and configure Elastic Search on our computer and perform simple queries. I am going to use  0.19.4 version in Windows, but the process is really similar with other versions / platforms. Follow these steps: Select and download a version of Elastic...
Read More About Creating a simple Elastic Search cluster »

Traditionally, building portals and/or web sites with "search that just works" has been hard but over the last few years, life has become easier. Various search tools such as Lucene and Solr have emerged, and platforms such as Liferay have integrated with them to provide the kind of search capabilities that I and my customers/users expect - fast, east to set up, easy to scale, and easy to...
Read More About Elastic Search: A distributed RESTful Search Engine »

MyBatis is one of the top notch ORM tools available. The MyBatis data mapper framework makes it easier to use a relational database with object-oriented applications. If you are familiar with SQL, the learning curve for myBatis is pretty much zero. If you want complete control of the schema, queries and wanted to write complex queries then myBatis is the best option. Without DI...
Read More About Annotation driven spring – xml based myBatis configuration »

Liferay has out-of-the-box OpenOffice integration which is robust and works very well for converting web content to a variety of document formats, including PDF. However, this approach requires you to have a separate OpenOffice server running, which may not be desired or feasible. Using JTidy and Flying Saucer (xhtmlrenderer), it's very easy to implement a nice self-contained...
Read More About Converting Liferay Web Content Articles to PDFs without OpenOffice »

I’m going to share some of my thoughts about multi-layer application API design. These are simple design problems, but I think it is good to have some discussion about them. Please feel free to present your point of view on these design items - I am eager to hear both supporting and contrary opinions!  On business logic layer, do we need to return any values from update APIs? ...
Read More About Some Thoughts on Multi-Layer Application API Design »

Identity Provider Custom Assertions After a request by a customer to provide custom attributes for an Identity Provider initiated login, I looked into what it would take to provide the attributes that were requested (a brief introduction to SAML can be viewed  here ). There are several ways to create custom attributes for a SAML assertion. The property...
Read More About Liferay 6.1 SAML Custom Assertion »

This question comes up a lot.  I think it's important to understand the primary features and functions of what each does.   Portals arrived in the the late 1990's with Yahoo.com and Excite.com.  They are a way of personalizing and aggregating information from disparate sources into a dashboard you can view instantly.  You can see your local weather, your sports...
Read More About Do I need a portal or a content manager? »

At Xtivia, we have extensive experience delivering enterprise portal, content management, and collaboration solutions since the late 1990s, and have seen this product space mature and evolve over the years. We started with traditional commercial software from the likes of Vignette and Epicentric in the late 1990s, and moving into IBM WebSphere Portal in 2003-2004. IBM WebSphere Portal was...
Read More About Top 10 reasons why Liferay is the best Enterprise Portal product »