Liferay 4.2 has been released. It features ESB/JBI integration with jBPM and Apache ServiceMix, Parallel Rendering, Dynamic Virtual Hosting, and much more. Liferay has integration with Alfresco for content management, many samples showing the use of various Java frameworks, WSRP support, single-signon capabilities, and has been deployed on an impressive array of application servers and servlet containers. The only server it hasn't been successfully deployed on (yet) is JFox, an open source J2EE application server from China. Database support is just as wide, with support for DB2, SAP, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Interbase, Hypersonic, and more.

Excellent! I was looking through future releases and saw BI (Liferay Vision). Interesting. Is that going to be from the ground up or reused some of what is out there?

This portal is great! I love it. I thought it's slow but the fact is you just need to know how to tune up. I have it running for my company portal and it works fine. Bugs? Microsoft products have tons too. One thing good about this product is that its structure is pretty clean. The only problem is that it lacks of many documentations such as portlet development and very detail user guide. The current user guide doesn't really explain every component of this system, it simply concentrates on showing how to use the security of the system, that's it. However, I could see that the community is getting big and people are helping to grow this little product so I really recommend Liferay.

Bugs? Microsoft products have tons too.

Not sure if my post was clear, but I agree with you Andy. I was trying to say Sharepoint is slow slow slow - and it is a developed by a company with lots of money behind it. To top off the slowness, try debugging errors with it. :(

Not sure if my post was clear, but I agree with you Andy. I was trying to say Sharepoint is slow slow slow - and it is a developed by a company with lots of money behind it. To top off the slowness, try debugging errors with it. :(

Sharepoint is the most disgusting thing we have ever been forced to use. period.

However, I could see that the community is getting big and people are helping to grow this little product so I really recommend Liferay.

People have been saying that for several years now. There is no hope of ever getting usable documentation from Liferay-- they want your $$ through consulting gigs. I like the idea of Liferay, it just isn't a viable option w/o complete unit tests and documentation.

is it still slow, buggy, with incredibly heavy resource usage and without any unit tests?

Boot up time on Tomcat is about 8-9 seconds. Page load time is at .25 seconds. Was recently clocked by InfoWorld at 10x faster load handling than other portals. Added unit tests. Added ajax parallel rendering. See http://www.liferay.com/ for latest feature set.

Boot up time on Tomcat is about 8-9 seconds. Page load time is at .25 seconds. Was recently clocked by InfoWorld at 10x faster load handling than other portals.

Nice arbitrary comparison with unnamed vendors. Here's another arbitrary statement with regard to scalability: our SiteVision portal can handle the load of the Swedish IRS website during tax declaration day on a single IBM ThinkPad (16M hits/day, subsecond response times assumed). They chickened out this year and used 5 Dell servers instead, which had an average CPU load of about 50-60%. And another one on portal performance: when the Swedish IRS switched from a static DreamWeaver website served by Apache to our SiteVision portal/CMS platform which dynamically generates web sites using JSR168 portlets their average response time went from .24 seconds to .22 seconds per page load. I can give you more arbitrary performance numbers, but I think you get the point ;-)

I can give you more arbitrary performance numbers, but I think you get the point ;-)

the point I am getting is that you are plugging your product on a competitor's announcement thread

I can give you more arbitrary performance numbers, but I think you get the point ;-)

the point I am getting is that you are plugging your product on a competitor's announcement thread

Do you think that this competitors unsubstantiated claims, which are blatantly incorrect, should not be addressed? I could have said "that's just wrong", but it seemed like a better idea to explain why I think it was wrong too, or I'd be guilty of the same error. Due to the nature of the claim I was addressing it would seem almost impossible to do so without "plugging" whatever it was that made that claim blatantly incorrect, and yes, in this case it happened to be my own product. C'est la vie.

Do you think that this competitors unsubstantiated claims, which are blatantly incorrect, should not be addressed?

I could have said "that's just wrong", but it seemed like a better idea to explain why I think it was wrong too, or I'd be guilty of the same error. Due to the nature of the claim I was addressing it would seem almost impossible to do so without "plugging" whatever it was that made that claim blatantly incorrect, and yes, in this case it happened to be my own product. C'est la vie.

+1. Rickard was merely putting things in perspective and pointing out the obvious that most of us in technology know... benchmarks are unreliable as a gauge. Actually providing real-world customer performance stories is much more reliable. Benchmarking portals are probably worse than normal, as most of these "outfits" don't bench the portal framework, but the pages, and depending on what portlets I have on a page, it could impact performance drastically leading to questionable results. Anyway, instead of this degrading in to a flame-war over benchmarks... Congrats to the Liferay team on this release. STAY METAL! Roy Russo

Rickard was merely putting things in perspective and pointing out the obvious that most of us in technology know... benchmarks are unreliable as a gauge. Actually providing real-world customer performance stories is much more reliable.

Or at least more useful, as it shows what an actual user is experiencing in a real scenario. As you point out, it's really difficult to do reasonable benchmarks of portals, as one would basically have to do "Hello World" portlets only in order to not interfere with the portal framework performance, which is what one may want to benchmark. But then again, since in our case the portlets *are* important, as they implement the CMS functionality, it *is* useful to know their performance as well. And for that I think real-life numbers are more useful than lab tests.

Anyway, instead of this degrading in to a flame-war over benchmarks... Congrats to the Liferay team on this release.

+1, we are not competitors to Liferay in any sense of the word, so it would be meaningless to not encourage their work! I wish all the best to Liferay and any other portal vendor who is doing good things.

Boot up time on Tomcat is about 8-9 seconds. Page load time is at .25 seconds. Was recently clocked by InfoWorld at 10x faster load handling than other portals. Added unit tests. Added ajax parallel rendering. See http://www.liferay.com/ for latest feature set.

Do you call a few 10 liner base junit classes unit tests for a huge app like liferay? Liferay is a good product, iff you are to just deploy it and use some of its features. As soon as you want to customize it, or enhance it, or even use its features heavily, you end up cursing yourself for choosing it. Thanks to non existing javadoc comments it's even more fun! Honestly I think the liferay team should stop adding new features and instead go back to drawing board and start from scratch with a maintainable/readable codebase! ;-) I'm surprised the other open source portal servers hasn't caught up with liferay, feature-wise I mean. They look good architecturally, but they just don't look finished/polished. Ara.

Page load time 0.25 seconds, measured by specific tools??? Funny staff for "parallel AJAX"!!! How many request-response should be done to show simple DOM? And you call it "Page load 0.25" Fake. Visual measurement: few seconds per "action", double-Opteron on SuSE gets overloaded with a single (local) user. LifeRay 4.3.3

is it still slow, buggy, with incredibly heavy resource usage and without any unit tests?

Try working with Sharepoint. lol. It's all about perspective.

Liferay's feature set, dedication to standards, and compatibility with major app servers and databases is truly astounding. In some ways, they are way ahead of commercial competitors. For example, Liferay introduced support for JSF portlets about 6-8 months before BEA. And last I checked, Oracle still doesn't support JSF portlets. With the release of 4.0, there are many recorded (Lifecast) tutorials available for free at the Liferay website. The message boards are very active, and I've observed that the staff at Liferay post free advice and answers on the message boards seemingly every day.

If anyone has any experiences taking an existing liferay portal and migrating to any proprietary portal solution such as Websphere Portal or BEA Portal or any other JSR 168 compliant one.