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Liferay as a platform for custom web applications

Henri Sora & Jouko Pirinen 12.9.2013

12.9.2013 www.ambientia.net

Henri Sora

© Sofia Nordström

- Ambientia- Since 1998- Director, Technology and Services- Board Member & Partner

- Aucor (software)- Board Member

- Labrox (life sciences) - Chairman of the Board

- Father of three children - (7 y, 4 y and ~2 y)

- Hobbies - Hiking - Sailing- Kayaking - Bicycling

Twitter: @henrisora

Jouko Pirinen

© Jouko Pirinen

- Ambientia- Since 2005- Senior Software Developer- Partner

- Hobbies - Hiking- Fishing- Reading- Gym

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Today, Custom Web Applications

with Liferay

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Common use cases for Liferay

Intranets

Extranets

Large scale web sites

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Old Portal

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Old Portal

Modern Portal: Application Platform

Accelerating Application Development

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The technologies for Custom Applications

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Permissions API -

User authentication, authorisation and permissions

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Permissions API

The good • Versatile system• Commonly required API’s are from out of the box

• Permissions & Authentication API • UI to handle changes to the users • Tag library for JSP pages

• Easily modified and extendable for custom portlets

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The bad • It is a complicated system and has learning curve

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Liferay’s permission data model

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See, it is quite

complex...

One day to learn – one year to master

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CMS Functionality -

Page Content and editing

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CMS Functionality

The good • Flexible content structure and display definition i.e.,

Structures and Templates• Versatile document storage (i.e. excellent API’s) • Content versioning • Scheduled publishing of content • Workflow capabilities • Articles can be integrated easily to custom portlets

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The bad • The UI a bit challenging

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Editor

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Good. No need to write yet another CMS system for

my apps

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Content template

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Asset Framework -

Content aggregator for portlets

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Asset Framework

The good • Shared storage and display for various content items in the

application • Custom portlets can be integrated to the Asset Framework and

can be published as assets• Categories; tags; commenting; etc.

• Display styles and methods can be set based on the content type

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The bad • Again, correct Asset Framework usage requires learning • The Asset Publisher and other display portlets require

modification almost each time they are being used because the OOTB setup seldom meets the project’s requirements

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Loads of buttons

over here...

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Asset Selection

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This is quite

powerful and

dynamic. Good.

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Sites and Organisations-

Multiple Web Sites with

centralised management

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Sites and Organisations

The good • Staging functionality • Private and public pages

• Can have unique domain names• Content can be structured to sites with different rights • Page and Site Templates enables fast structure

management and modification

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The bad • Site versus organisation selection can be tricky • Data migrated via large lar pakages

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Site pages, page details

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Service Builder-

Service Layer Generation and Data Modelling

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Service Builder

The good • Easy data structure mapping and finder mapping with XML

• Can be finetuned with portlet-model-hints.xml• Automatic service layer generation• Easy extension of the default interfaces• Permissions Framework works nicely with the Service Builder • Multiple portlet apps can use dependencies from each other

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The bad• Automatically generated code is difficult to accept for certain

developers• It is difficult to fix bugs in the generated code

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Service.xml

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WOW!JSON for

free!

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Common requirements for enterprise web applications

- out of the box for developers

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The technologies we are NOT

leveraging

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Techologies and componets not used

1. Liferay’s CE- version2. Most of the OOTB portlets

• Liferay has a large set of portlets included but only a few of them are commonly used when building custom applications

3. Struts Framework• Commonly replaced by Spring or Liferay MVC• On some cases needs to be used

4. Ext environment• Is replaced by hooks in most cases

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Example

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Newolo - again

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Newolo

• It did not require a Portal as such it benefits a lot of about • Permissions API: user Authentication and Authorisation • Service Builder • UI with JSP & JSTL• SOAP based integration with custom made content repository • Application architecture utilizes site structures to enhance

logic and manageability • Themes and layouts for multiple clients • Documents and Media to update videos to the system • Localization for all content • Liferay scheduling to send reminders

• Therefore, Liferay is being used in a custom application

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Accelerating Application Development

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Liferay is good for custom

applications

1) OOTB Developer

Functionality

2) OOTB Portal’s

management interfaces

3) Portal’s footprint is not an issue with modern

hardware

4) Decent licensing model for single app

usage

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Questions? Twitter: @henrisora & henri.sora@ambientia.fi

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Sähköposti: henri.sora@ambientia.fi

Twitter: @henrisora

Henri & Jouko