We can’t even begin to imagine what you’re thinking of building, but whatever it is, you’re going to put your heart and soul into it. Building it on Liferay’s web platform can give you a leg up, by providing to you everything you need to support your application, so you can concentrate solely on what you’re building, and not the rest of the features your users expect will come along with it.
Liferay as an Application Development Platform
Imagine your application for a moment. Does it require users to register with your site? Will they be able to comment on content contained within your application? Is there some asset that users can tag or categorize? If you think about the layout of the application, would it benefit from modularization? Could you make use of a rich JavaScript framework with many components built into it? How about security–will you need to make information available to some users, but not to all users? Liferay Portal has all of this and more available to the developer, so you don’t have to write it yourself.
Liferay Portal’s development framework is a great help when you’re building a web application. While the framework itself is covered in other resources such as the Liferay Developer’s Guide or Liferay in Action, the strengths of Liferay as a platform are also apparent once you’ve finished writing your application.
For example, bug fixes to your applications are easy to apply, because Liferay applications are hot deployed to the running server. Liferay’s Marketplace gives you a ready-made shopping center for your applications. And Liferay’s web services and JSON architecture make it easy for you to share data from your applications to other systems running on different platforms.
You get all this–not to mention the automatic Facebook and OpenSocial integration mentioned above–simply by using Liferay’s development platform. It’s a very powerful platform, and certainly worth your investigation.
A Great Integration Platform
If you’re building an enterprise system, portals were designed in the first place to be a single point of entry to your users’ applications and content. Since Liferay Portal integrates well with user directories such as LDAP and Active Directory, and single sign-on systems such as SAML and OpenSSO, it fits well into your enterprise systems. This allows you to use it as an integration platform for existing applications.
Liferay Portal, since it adheres to the JSR standard for portlets, was designed from the ground up for application integration. You can mix and match any application installed in the system on any page within the portal. You can make use of any APIs provided by other systems to integrate their data into an application window in Liferay. And applications you create with Liferay’s Service Builder API are web service-enabled from the start.
Hosting Multiple Sites on Liferay Portal
Liferay Portal excels as a multi-site hosting platform. You can use it to host multiple sites under the same overall architecture (like Facebook, MySpace, or Pinterest offer to their users), or you could host several completely different web sites based solely on Liferay’s ability to serve multiple instances of itself from the same physical installation.
In the first scenario, Liferay Portal’s Sites architecture lets you create multiple, different web sites that have public and/or private sets of pages and as many pages within those sets as you’d like. Users join the web site, and once they’re members, they can join and leave open sites with one click. Some sites can be defined as restricted or private, and users can’t access those unless they’re added by site administrators. All of these sites can have canonical domain names such as baseballcards.liferay.com or progrock.liferay.com.
Using this construct, you can build anything from Facebook, to Yahoo Groups, to SourceForge, to the now-defunct-but-once-loved Geocities. There is no limit to the number of sites you can have: some Liferay installations have only one or two, but others have many thousands.
In the second scenario, Liferay Portal lets you create completely separate instances of itself from the same installation. Users, groups, organizations, sites, and roles from each instance are kept completely separate. If a user registers for a user id on one instance, he or she would have to register as a new user on another instance as well.
This lets you host many different, separate web sites from one Liferay Portal installation. Users of each instance have access to the same powerful content management, collaboration, social, and web development platform that they’d have if they were operating from a single, standalone installation.