LIFERAY OVERVIEW

Portal and Web Application

The biggest difference between a portal and a web app is that a portal implies configurability.

however, most portals allow users to configure things to a certain extent.

The goal is to allow each users to see what they want and only what they want.

A portal is just a specific type of web application. “it provides a single point of entry to widely distributed information on the web”

Collection of Web components are landing in one platform called Portal.

Each web components is called as Portlets.

What is Portal?

Portal is a web based application that commonly provides personalization, content aggregation , authentication..etc.

What is Portlet?

Portlets are pluggable user interface web components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page.

Java and Portal:

Java Community release Specifications for portlets. There are two Specification for Portal.

JSR168 ( Java Specification Request)

JSR286

These Specification described the behavior of Portlets inside Portal.

Internal Structure of Portal Page

How portal Page gets Generated?

1. Each portlet—A, B, C, D,E, and F—generates the contents for the user. The contents might be static or generated dynamically, depending on the logic of the portlet application.

Each portlet is basically a Java application that runs some code when activated.

2. The container receives the contents generated by several portlets.

3. The container hands over the contents to the portal server.

4. The portal server creates the portal page, During page creation, the portal server applies the designated page layouts to place each portlet at the appropriate location.

5. The server sends the created page to the client device (the browser).

6. The browser displays the contents to the user.

Liferay Setup

1. Download Liferay Tomcat Bundled with Tomcat ( liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.5.war ) from liferay site:

www.liferay.com--->Download→ click “Bundled with Tomcat ”

2. Extract that bundle:

D:/LiferayPortal/server

3. Remove Sample data: sevencogs-Hook inside tomcat/web-apps

4. Database Configuration :

Create portal-ext.properties file inside:

(tomcat-6.0.\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\classes )

add this entries:

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal? useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8& useFastDateParsing=false jdbc.default.username=root

jdbc.default.password=root

5. Go to bin Folder and Start Server :

D:\LiferayPortal\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin\startup.bat

- Gnaniyar Zubair