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InfoQ Homepage News Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team

Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team

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Last month at JavaOne, Liferay, Inc. announced the release of the 5.0 version of their Liferay Portal product. The Liferay press release highlights a handful of the key tools and uses in the portal product:
Liferay Portal 5.0 includes the core collaboration tools needed in today's enterprises, including:
  • Blogs, Message Boards, and Wikis
  • A dynamic tagging system for user-driven categorization
  • AJAX-based mail client that allows users to send email directly from the portal
  • Shared calendars, chat and polls
  • Direct portlet publishing to the MySpace and Facebook networks
  • Ability to leverage iGoogle gadgets directly within portal deployments
As Liferay’s CTO, Michael Young, promised in InfoQ’s coverage of the 4.4 release of Liferay, the 5.0 release is JSR 286 compliant. The specification went final this month and includes a number of new features. Liferay’s Jorge Ferrer highlights a few of them:
  • Inter-portlet communication (aka IPC): there are two new mechanisms to achieve this. The first is called shared render parameters and allows portlets to set params that can be read by other portlets. This rather simple mechanism will probably be enough for all but the most complex communication needs. For those complex ones there is a second method based on events. The main advantage of this second method is that it allows a fully uncoupled communication. A portlet issues an event and doesn't have to care if there is anyone listening for it.
  • Resource serving: this is very useful not only to serve binary content such as files but also to improve drastically the support for AJAX in portlets. Through the new serveResource() method it's possible to serve HTML fragments, XML, JSON, anything that your AJAX based app can consume in the client side.
  • Portlet filters: Add filters to execute code before or after a request to a portlet. While this was already possible by using a solution provided by Apache Portals it's now part of the standard. This makes it easier to use and will fortunately foster the development of reusable filters.
In addition, Liferay, Inc. announced Sun Microsystems is officially joining the Liferay Open Source community. Liferay's CEO, Bryan Cheung, shared his excitement:
Sun's participation in Liferay's community is an indication of our community's strength and the quality of the software we've produced. Our commitment to open standards means Liferay easily integrates with the Sun family of products. We are pleased that Sun has chosen to participate with us in building great software to serve our communities.
Learn more about Liferay on their website: http://www.liferay.com.

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