Www.Bernal.Net

I recently had the chance to review the book, Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets by Jonas Yuan. A colleague of mine had recently been talking to me about Liferay and his experience using it, so I thought this was a good chance to get up to speed. Liferay is an open source portal. A free of charge JSR 286 compliant framework that has many well defined features. In my colleagues case, he has been using Liferay for some small sites he is building for friends and himself, where the cost of WebSphere Portal (even the express edition) would be a bit prohibitive for these small ventures.

I have to admit I was impressed by the features available within the Liferay Portal. Blogs, Wikis, Messaging, and Google integration, combined with the standard portal features around site definition, navigation, and security,make for a compelling package. Lightweight content management is also available along with the ability to integrate with other content management solutions. Very impressive to me was the administrative console that contained some cool memory management features. Liferay actually comes with a nice set of default portlets, so many standard features that you may need are readily available, and since it it JSR compliant the opportunity to build custom portlets is readily available and industry standardized.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give the book a 9.5, only because I think it is lacking a bit in the area of infrastructure and setup. That being said, if you are planning on working with Liferay this book is a must have for your library. It is really not touted as an infrastructure book, nor is it a development guide as far as that goes, but since the author opens the topic by discussing installation options, I was hoping for a little more discussion around installation and especially scalability options. My hunch is it probably depends upon the application server platform that you decide upon (Liferay runs on WebSphere according to the documentation).

As an overall administrative reference this book definitely covers the basics, and then some. The book is well written and an easy read. The technical jargon seems to be minimized (maybe I'm just immune) and it is written with the lay person in mind. Working through the book can also help you define your site based on the example case that is built upon over the course of the book. If you are a business user, who needs to administer a Liferay installation, then this would be your bible until you learn enough to handle things on your own.

I haven't blogged in a while, but I have been busy. IBM Press has a new promotion going on for the summer which my new book Application Architecture for WebSphere is part of.

Go to www.ibmpressbooks.com/SOAspecial for details and some discounts on my new book when it becomes available this Fall!

Included in the SOA/WebSphere promotion is:

• FREE Downloadable eBook
• Buy 2 Books, Get The New Language of Business Free
• 35% Discount on our New and Classic Books
• New SOA Episodes in OnPodcasts Network


IBM Press is celebrating summer with special deals on SOA and WebSphere titles! Download the free SOA and WebSphere Sampler eBook for excerpts from our top new releases. If you like what you read, order a copy at a 35% discount. Plus order one of our featured titles plus any other IBM Press book and get a free copy of Sandy Carter's The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0, while supplies last. And listen to new audio podcasts from Sandy Carter herself, as well as Robert Laird, author of Executing SOA.

As we grow our skills as professional developers and architects, we tend to forget that our profession is constantly churning with new people, ideas, and technology. This churn, and the knowledge that Software Engineering is not like any other type of engineering is why we continue to build poor applications time and time again. What is a poor application? A poor application is any application that does not live up to its design, in terms of performance, security, usability, or function. It should not be that hard for any of us to think back on a project we have worked on, or led, that meets this criterion. The science of software engineering should be composed of the same rigorous set of rules and standards that other sciences have to live by. No other engineered product is released to the general public without inspection, yet in software inspections take place a small fraction of the time, and at that are often cursory and incomplete.

I bring it up because I'm in the middle of a project where we are trying to track down a elusive memory leak. This isn't necessaryly bad code, in fact most of it looks pretty good, but a few extra steps might have saved some trouble.

We are finishing up the final draft of my new book Application Architecture for WebSphere. It is not due out until the fall, but it takes that long to get it production ready. Interesting how the publishing phases match up with the phases we go through in our portal projects. But one thing that publishers do not skimp on is editing and reviews. An area where we in the IT world often take shortcuts. I devote an entire chapter in the new book on standards, logging, and code review process with examples and best practices to help new project teams avoid these problems. Of course we never expect to have problems.

I wrote this book because I continued to see problems in the way that customers designed and built WebSphere and WebSphere Portal applications. I was convinced that by writing some of my concerns down many of these problems would magically disappear. Well perhaps it is not that easy, but hopefully reading this text and considering some of its suggestions will help you on your way to obtaining software excellence.

- Keep having fun!