読み物小舖 -- Are you ready to use Liferay ???

說真的, 到底怎樣可以決定是否要用某個技術? 又怎樣可以決定風險與時程的弔詭化學作用?
但真正的重點會是在 ... 你準備好了嗎? 做專案不是搞Lab, 不求百分之百掌握, 但50%是一定要的.

讓我們從Liferay的功能開始說起, 看看有多少東西是我們沒碰過的 ... 可怕死了 ... 要拿客戶當白老鼠

Features

JSR 168 (Portlet API) Compliant

You can hot deploy any JSR 168 compliant portlet. This means you can provide more functionality to your end users by writing custom portlets. Or, you can deploy portlets that you buy from a portlet vendor.
遵守JSR168, 可為你的客戶製作客製化的portlet, 或向portlet廠商購買&Deploy portlet.

WSRP Compliant

WSRP is a web services standard that allows you to publish portlets from your portal to external portals and allows you to consume portlets in your portal from external portals. This allows you to buy and sell portlet functionality as a service.
遵守WSRP, 這是一個web service標準, 讓你可以發布自己Portal上的portlet到外面的Portal, 而且從外部的Portal消費你的Portal的portlet, 讓你可以買賣porlet.

CMS

Liferay provides content management system functionality via a set of portlets that give your organization a flexible templating tool built on top of XSLT technologies. This allows you to build your site while cleanly separating content from the look and feel of a site. This page is served by the CMS tool. We will be JSR 170 (CMS API) compliant after the specification is finalized.
提供CMS, 經由一組porlets讓你有組織與彈性的建立自己的site, 透過XSLT技術, 可定義彈性的template, 讓內容與外觀分離.

Themes

Liferay provides a hot deployable theme architecture that allows you to change the look and feel of the portal without modifying Liferay's core code. Graphic designers can easily mock up new themes because all of our pages utilize DIVs and CSS standards.
提供hot deployable主題架構, 讓你不用修改程式即可變化Portal外觀. 由於所有的頁面都是採用div和css標準, 因此圖形設計者也可輕易製作.

SSO

Liferay provides a built in connector for CAS, Yale's single sign on engine. You can write custom hooks to integrate with other SSO engines like Netegrity.
Liferay can also synchronize its user list between the portal and an external data source like another database or LDAP server. A default connector for Microsoft Exchange is bundled with the portal.
提供CAS(耶魯的SSO engine)的連接器. 你可以製作hook來Integrate with 其他的SSO. 也可同步user list於Portal和其他資料庫或LDAP. Portal內建一個預設Microsoft Exchange的連接器.


ASP Model

Liferay was designed from the ground up to be used by application service providers. This means you can host multiple instances of the portal (distinguished by unique URLs) on one application server and database.

Application Server Agnostic

Unlike portals that come from application server vendors, Liferay is designed to be application server agnostic so you are not locked into a specific server. Liferay will work on lightweight servlet containers like Jetty and Tomcat, or on J2EE compliant servers like Borland ES, JBoss+Jetty/Tomcat, JOnAS+Jetty/Tomcat, JRun, OracleAS, Orion, Pramati, RexIP, Sun JSAS, WebLogic, and WebSphere.

An added bonus of being a Java portal means Liferay will work on many operating systems: BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), Linux (Fedora, Novell), Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Liferay不綁死於特定的application server, 可運作於多種servlet container或J2EE server, 和多種OS.


Spring, EJB, and AOP

Liferay's business beans are built on top of Spring. This allows you to leverage Spring's AOP, IOC, and proxy features to customize Liferay.

We use Spring to decide whether to call the POJO implementation of a business bean or the EJB wrapped implementation of a business bean. This allows deployers to decide whether to deploy Liferay on a heavyweight application server like Borland ES (and thus leverage VisiBroker's transaction features) or a lightweight container like Tomcat.
Business bean建造於Spring上, 可以使用Spring的APO, IOC ...

Database Agnostic

Liferay uses Hibernate as the ORM tool for the persistence layer which enables pluggable databases (DB2, Firebird, Hypersonic, InterBase, JDataStore, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP, SQL Server). This allows your organization to leverage existing resources without having to purchase new database hardware and software.
使用Hibernate與資料庫互動

Scalable N-Tier Cluster

Liferay is very scalable and uses OSCache to provide deployers with a clustered cache. You can scale by adding more nodes without sacrificing on caching.

You can cluster the enterprise release of Liferay in multiple tiers: presentation tier, business logic tier, and database tier to meet your specific load requirements.
使用OSCache以提供cluster功能.

Struts and Tiles

Liferay leverages off of Struts to follow the MVC pattern. Most programmers are already familiar with Struts, which means your developers will have an easier time of writing portlets in a familiar framework.

The look and feel of the portal can be easily customized and reskinned because the display logic is concentrated in a few template files read by Tiles.
使用Struts以遵守MVC架構, Portal外觀非常容易客製化, 因為呈現的邏輯主要是由幾個template file負責的, 請參考Tiles.

Internationalization

Liferay can display and receive input in multiple languages. Language resources for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese are already included.
支援i18n.

Personalization

Portlets can be rearranged to the unique preferences of a user or community. Move things up, down, and all around.
個人化.

Administration

Liferay allows administrators to easily manage users, groups, and roles through a GUI interface. Groups signify a collection of users. Roles signify permissions that a group or user can be bound to. Access to portlets are also restricted to users based on roles.

Administrators can also specify community pages so that all users who belong to a certain group see the same page.
可透過GUI介面輕易管理users, groups, roles. groups包含一組users, 而role則是設定group或user可存取的portlets.

Out of the Box Portlets

Liferay provides many useful portlets: Blogs, Calendar, Document Library, Journal (CMS), Image Gallery, Mail, Message Boards, Polls, RSS, and Wiki.

Portals are only useful so long as there are portlets that provide functionality. Our bundled portlets are a great starting point for a portal deployment. They also serve as a large code base of examples from which you can glean patterns on how to write portlets.
內含多個好用的portlets, 可作為portal deployment的好的開始, 也提供廣泛的範例程式碼, 讓你可收集如何製作portlet的模型.

Community Based Portlets

Many of the bundled portlets are community aware. For example, if you add an event to your HR community calendar, then Marketing would not be aware of it.
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