Introduction to Liferay. Liferay simple learning in 5 mins.

Liferay is an open-source enterprise portal used to enable corporate intranet and extranet. This Java-based web application platform provides a toolset for the development of customization of portals and websites.

Liferay also supports the use of open standards such as the OAI-PMH standard for metadata extraction from repositories (e.g., academic journals).

There are different types of Portlet containers such as Apache Pluto, Oracle Web center and Liferay. This tutorial is intended to provide you an explanation of the Liferay Portal. Lets us learn Liferay portals.

Liferay

It is a set of open-source software applications that provide enterprise-class portal capabilities. Java-based software platform that offers a solution for web content management and collaboration.

It is a content management framework or web application framework written in java. Liferay has a distinct benefit since it enables integration with all the advanced and inherited technologies like Java, .Net, PHP, C+, etc. It allows us to collate, integrate, and merge the features and databases of the existing systems. Leading organizations like Thales, Bosch Smart Home, VMware, and Airbus. Helicopters use Liferay for building good customer portals.

Liferay Portal

Portal is a web content management system (WCM). In other words, it is a portal framework that provides all in one as content management, collaboration, and social networking in one solution.

Portal Life Cycle Phases– The portal life cycle refers to the path a portal takes from development through production. The phases of the life cycle typically include development, testing, staging, and production. Each phase has certain tasks to do.. Some tasks are performed only once, setting up a content repository is one example.

• Development
• Testing
• Staging
• Production

The following are the methods in javax.portlet.Portlet Interfaces to represent portlet life cycle

• init(–) :  it will handle the portlet initialization phase in portlet lifecycle
• doView(–) : it will handle portlet render phase.
• processAction(–): it will handle portlet action phase.
• processEevent(–): it will handle event generation phase
• serveResource(–): it will handle the serving the recourse phase.
• destroy(): it will handle the portlet destroy phase.

Portlets

A portlet is a reusable web component that can draw the content from many other sources. Portlets can contain anything from static HTML content to Java controls also complex web services and process-heavy applications.

Portlets provide a way of presenting data from multiple sources in a meaningful and related way. It can display excerpts of other websites, generate summaries of key information, perform searches, and access get collections of information from a variety of data sources. Because several different portlets can be placed on a single page, users takes a benefit from a single-source experience even though, in reality, the content may be derived from multiple sources.

A Portlet container is built on a Servlet container. So ultimately it can be said that the portlet is running on a Servlet Container. But while developing apps, we view a portlet container separately from the Servlet/Java EE container.

Difference between portlets and servlets

• Both servlets and portlets use the “web.xml” deployment descriptor. However, portlets also have an additional deployment descriptor, portlet.xml, it has the declaration of all portlets that are used by the portlet container.
• Instead of HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse objects, portlets expect either an ActionRequest or RenderRequest object and ActionResponse or RenderResponse objects.limitations in the objects that portlets manage such as not having direct access to original servlet request parameters(JSR 168). But check your portlet specification and portlet container implementation to verify which features may or may not be available.
• Portlets have a Context interface that allows developers to access the Portlet application under which a portlet is running its similar to the servlet’s context interface.
• Servelet runs on servlet container but portlet on the portal container.

The following are the main reason to choose Liferay :

• it’s ready to use Application
• having technology Flexibility in Development.
• Easy customization and extending portal.
• SAAS Based Portal
• Support Multiple Server Environments and Operating Systems
• Robust Community
• Robust Content Management System
• have already developed a Permission System and Security mechanisms
• Open source CE and Enterprise Edition
• Market Place for new portlet applications and Easy deployment

Liferay portal installation requirement:

Environment: Windows, Tomcat Server, and Liferay 6.2CE with MySQL

Required Steps

1. Install JDK and set required environment variables (JAVA_HOME, path)
2. Download MySQL server and Start MySQL server then,
3. Connecting to MySQL server and creating Database for Liferay
4. Download Liferay 6.2 Tomcat Bundles
5. Configure the database setting in portal-ext.properties file and place the properties file in the Liferay Home directory.
6. Start tomcat server and access Liferay Portal
7. Do other required configurations for Liferay portal

Conclusion

Above all, we can conclude the basics of Liferay. It provides us with all the tools needed to create custom portlets, themes, and more. Liferay DXP also has an IDE which makes it easy to work with this framework.

For more details you can visit the official website :
https://blog.knoldus.com/introduction-to-liferay-dxp/