<img alt="Liferay" height="36" src="http://cdn.www.liferay.com/osb-www-theme/images/custom/heading.png" width="146" />

After working with Liferay for several months, I would conclude that Liferay totally SUCKS!!!

1) It is terrible to END USERS without lots of customisations.
- The user interface is so old fashioned. Oh please, it is 2012 now, try to use AJAX!
- Different portlets have different approaches for the same thing. For example, the file upload interfaces for Wiki / Message Board / Document and Media portlet are totally different, why so complicated?!
- How come there are so many USELESS portlets? Just try to increase the number and tell the public that Liferay is powerful? Some of existing portlets should be integrated and some of them should be removed, no one will use them at all!!
- You know Apple and Steve Jobs, right? Then you should how importance user interface is!! It is not 199x any more!!!

2) Nightmare to DEVELOPERS!!
- As mentioned above, lots customisations are needed.
- The project is too complicated. If you are doing in-depth customisation, you will feel my pain.
- Many essential features are missing, e.g. audit trail log, search result highlight, etc
- How come there is no documentation? Open source project without documentation... WTF.
- How come there is no comment in source code at all? Which university have you developers studied? Liferay should aim at being a sustainable project, not homework, okay!!
- The portlets are interdependent. Disabling one, others may be affected. What is the meaning of having different portlets in Liferay?
- There is no one to guarantee the quality? Where is the project manager?

Open source is not an excuse for creating this rubbish.
I have no reason to believe that Liferay can still survive in Web 2.0 era.
If you are considering Liferay for your project, please do yourself a favour and throw this rubbish away or you will regret. I MEAN IT.

Because of Liferay, my workload increased a lot. I am too angry now, sorry for being impolite.

RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 3:13 AM

Answer

Bill Hillston

Rank: New Member

Posts: 4

Join Date: September 6, 2012

Just found some articles supporting my views.
http://sadsoftware.blogspot.hk/2009/02/things-you-should-know-about-liferay-in.html
http://ask.metafilter.com/160241/Is-Liferay-really-as-terrible-as-it-seems-to-be
http://amplicate.com/hate/liferay

By the way, [Reply with Quote] [Quick Reply], don't you think it is too complicated?
You will know what I mean i you try to reply this thread ;-)

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 3:26 AM

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Bill Hillston

Rank: New Member

Posts: 4

Join Date: September 6, 2012

http://liferaycms.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/liferay-hate-love-learn/
"In terms of UX Liferay is light years behind WordPress and miles behind Alfresco and Joomla."

http://amplicate.com/hate/liferay
"Liferay is a very very buggy poortly written piece of software. Developed by people that live in a bubble and think that everything they do is awesome."

I laughed. LOL

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RE: Liferay sucks!! - may be not so.

September 6, 2012 8:21 AM

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Sampsa Sohlman

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 183

Join Date: September 27, 2007

Hi Bill

Some of comments of mine.

Bill Hillston:

By the way, [Reply with Quote] [Quick Reply], don't you think it is too complicated?
You will know what I mean i you try to reply this thread ;-)

I find these very handy. Liferay forum is very usefull. You can quote person very easily and the tag language for writing these is good and simple enough. There is also draft support.

Bill Hillston:

- How come there are so many USELESS portlets? Just try to increase the number and tell the public that Liferay is powerful? Some of existing portlets should be integrated and some of them should be removed, no one will use them at all!!

True, I believe there is reason behind this history, since it is only possible to override functionality of core features, but not plugins. May be this comes in future.

Bill Hillston:

2) Nightmare to DEVELOPERS!!
- As mentioned above, lots customisations are needed.
- The project is too complicated. If you are doing in-depth customisation, you will feel my pain.

Lifeay is a platform and provides methods to extend it's functionality. Liferay architecture is actually quite pretty and have well designed layers and the means how to share information between plugins. There is order on design, which helps to find out the correct place for modification and many times you do not have recompile Liferay to use this modification, but you can use Liferay's hook feature just to override or extend that functionality. There is quite fast way to create persistence with service builder and third party extension XMLPortlet factory to generate UI too.

Bill Hillston:

- How come there is no documentation? Open source project without documentation... WTF.

There is documentation

Bill Hillston:

- How come there is no comment in source code at all? Which university have you developers studied? Liferay should aim at being a sustainable project, not homework, okay!!

Good and clean code does not need comments emoticon

.. because comment's might be wrong and I'm not talking about the API documentation, which is coming better.

Still does not mean that Liferay code would be so good or clean. As mentioned before, the code is organized quite well for the layers may be due service builder related architecture, but still there should not be methods with [url=https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/blob/master/portal-impl/src/com/liferay/portal/events/ServicePreAction.java#initThemeDisplay(HttpServletRequest%20request,%20HttpServletResponse response)]1130 lines of code. On other hand there are some mind blowing examples doing things better than in core java.

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RE: Liferay sucks!! - may be not so.

September 6, 2012 8:45 AM

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Aad Nales

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 25

Join Date: January 5, 2012

Mmmm,

we have used Liferay now for a year with a team of about 15 developers that all had at least 7 year java experience in almost all of the consisting technologies of Liferay. I have heard comments like "Liferay Sucks" quite a few times from the guys that work with it. However, we have researched all other frameworks and have not found anything that is more geared towards reuse. Problem obviously is that the quality of Liferay is lacking.

Having said all of this there are two ways to handle this frustration. One is to vent it and do nothing and the other one is to get involved! In a thread not completely unrelated to this one you will find that a dozen or so developers are now going to provide patches on the community edition. It would be great if the knowledge gained in those activities is fed back into the main development process. Especially since Liferay's main challenge is still ahead.

Liferay is not yet ready for the cloud age. It can off course be installed in the cloud but it is not cloudy itself. Eventually the product will have to evolve into that or a framework on top of e.g. the Google App Engine will overtake it. My fear is that Liferay's core is not ready for a change like this.

regards,
Aad Nales

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RE: Liferay sucks!! - may be not so.

September 12, 2012 3:03 PM

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William Gosse

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 105

Join Date: July 4, 2010

I think it should be mentioned that Liferay is a deployment platform and not just a framework for web app development. As a platform it provides a tremendous amount of infrastructure out of the box that can be used immediately without any custom development.

Liferay also doesn't restrict from using other web development frameworks, such as Icefaces and Vaadin, for developing your custom portlets. I know that both of these frameworks are Ajax enabled.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 4:45 AM

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Muzakir Khan

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 112

Join Date: March 14, 2012

Hi Bill Hill!!..
Its you who suck!!..

The user interface is so old fashioned. Oh please, it is 2012 now, try to use AJAX!

If your opinion is that liferay uses old technology, then remember, Old is Gold..
I think so you are frustated and not able to catch Liferay properly..
Better you take leave for a while.. BILL HILL, I Suggest you to enjoy your leave on top of the hill..

Regards
Muzakir Khan

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 4:42 AM

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Pradeep Pandey

Rank: New Member

Posts: 6

Join Date: July 18, 2012

I think You Need Proper training in Liferay....

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 4:50 AM

Answer

Rank: Liferay Legend

Posts: 8000

Join Date: March 23, 2010

Muzakir Khan:

Hi Bill Hill!!..
Its you who suck!!..

The user interface is so old fashioned. Oh please, it is 2012 now, try to use AJAX!

If your opinion is that liferay uses old technology, then remember, Old is Gold..
I think so you are frustated and not able to catch Liferay properly..
Better you take leave for a while..

Muzakir, you've missed the point. You should have pointed out that liferay does use ajax.
Bill has right to his opinion but he should have done a better job doing his homework before he made his post.
No document? I mean what that "Documentation" in the above menu bar?

Nevertheless, he does have a point in in liferay having different ui to do the same thing and ui being too complex
and having portlets that aren't normally now used.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:00 AM

Answer

Muzakir Khan

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 112

Join Date: March 14, 2012

Hitoshi Ozawa:

Muzakir Khan:

Hi Bill Hill!!..
Its you who suck!!..

The user interface is so old fashioned. Oh please, it is 2012 now, try to use AJAX!

If your opinion is that liferay uses old technology, then remember, Old is Gold..
I think so you are frustated and not able to catch Liferay properly..
Better you take leave for a while..

Yes Hitoshi, I knew already that Liferay supports Ajax.. But what is the use of making to understand a person who is trying to under estimate Our beautiful technology..
I think so he has been appointed by other rival technologies to post in our forum like this.. let me give me an example, " If an Elephant is walking then Dogs start barking at the Elephant but then too Elephant keeps walking with Pride.. Cheerz to whole world's Liferay team emoticon

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:30 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

Posts: 8000

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I think a post like Bill's implies liferay is succeeding because so many people complains about MS Windows but it's still one of the most used.

I think the recent spam attacks are further proof that liferay is being to get more notice.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:46 AM

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James Falkner

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Liferay Master

Posts: 975

Join Date: September 17, 2010

Hitoshi Ozawa:

"A rising tide lifts all boats" emoticon

I am happy to see so many constructive responses from our community. And, like Juan, I agree we can and will learn from them. I don't have anything else to add, you guys pretty much covered it all.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:03 AM

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Subhash Pavuskar

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 184

Join Date: March 12, 2012

I guess This user made fake account and posting some nonsense things !!! I request to Liferay team Block this user, this thread and his/her IP address .

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:27 AM

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Jignesh Vachhani

Rank: Liferay Master

Posts: 755

Join Date: March 10, 2008

Bill

Let me clear your query here is,

First Liferay doesn't use all the old fashion technologies. Its using all the latest and most widely used framework like spring,hibernate,faces,lucene,solr,alloyui(might be you haven't heard yet)etc etc,

Second thing is liferay comes up with lot many portlets which might be not helpful so you can delete it easily.

Third point is Wiki,Document library and media,message board is initially designed but you can easily customize all the out of the box portlets very easilty with the help of plugin-sdk environment. So using plugin-sdk , you can customize and create hook,portlet,theme,layout,web project etc.

For developer point of view , yes it would be tough at initial level once they started work in liferay but afterward once they gone through training and wiki articles,its make lifer very easy for developers. and specially some of the utility like service builder,theme creation etc makes developers restful work.

And regarding documentation, liferay consist many useful blogs,wiki and most useful forum discussion here by which many developers are getting lots of benefits.

So better you go with some liferay training which would make your system and life easier.

At last this is not final product developed by Liferay inc like other proprietary software , its open source and continuously will be in enhancement mode so you can also contribute your functionality or some useful stuff so that many open source lover can get benefits of that.
So come and join the liferay community.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:18 AM

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Pradeep Pandey

Rank: New Member

Posts: 6

Join Date: July 18, 2012

Hey Hillston
It may be hard for you to understand.".what is liferay". If you want to survive in IT industries then You have to do smart work not hard work

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:25 AM

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Juan Fernández

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Liferay Legend

Posts: 1192

Join Date: October 2, 2008

Hi guys

I don't think we should ban this user. I think we should learn from his comments and recognize the points where we need to improve.

If we "clean" his post a little bit, there are a few things we should focus on improving:

Bill Hillston:

- The user interface is so old fashioned. [...] try to use AJAX!

- True: despite we are starting to use it, we need more AJAX interfaces, above all in admin portlets

Bill Hillston:

- Different portlets have different approaches for the same thing.

- Agree: we should unify the way we interact with the system. We are working on it and we will count on a UX expert very soon.

Bill Hillston:

- Good point: we should make the core lighter and improve the plugins we have to make them more useful to satisfy our user's needs. I wouldn't state they are useless, but I would agree that many portlets that come out-of-the-box can be heavily improved.

Bill Hillston:

- Many essential features are missing, e.g. audit trail log, search result highlight, etc

This is an ongoing project. We can't implement everything all our users may need, as our resources are limited, and I guess this is something that will happen with any piece of software: they cover your needs to some extent. The rest, you can implement it by your self while we fight to give you the best product ever.

Bill Hillston:

- How come there is no comment in source code at all?

We are publishing tons of javadocs. Stay tunned - http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.1/javadocs/

Bill Hillston:

- There is no one to guarantee the quality?

In the license you see when you use our software you may read: "This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details."

But despite of that legal point, we struggle and work like crazy to create to best platform for you (which you download for free, by the way). If you need a quality guarantee, you can use our enterprise edition, which will allow you to report any bug you find and to get it fixed for you.

I just wanted to thank you for being sincere and for sharing your thoughts, as we learn a lot from this kind of comments: this keep us improving for our users.

Regards,
Juan Fernández

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 5:33 AM

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Jignesh Vachhani

Rank: Liferay Master

Posts: 755

Join Date: March 10, 2008

Yes Juan,
I agreed , We should have to clear the doubt here and make liferay more scalable. emoticon

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 6:10 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

Posts: 8000

Join Date: March 23, 2010

Juan, if you're going to comment, please do it correctly.

- Many essential features are missing, e.g. audit trail log, search result highlight, etc

Isn't there an audit portlet in EE? Search portlet's results are highlighted.

- There is no one to guarantee the quality?

Bill's looking at the community version. Other open source projects also don't guarentee quality on their community version. If the user wants guarantee, get the enterprise edition. Furthermore, Bill probably probably haven't looked at other commercial software's license either. This is the line from MS Windows Vista license. I think Oracle has a similar clause.

25. LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF DAMAGES. You can recover from Microsoft and its
suppliers only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the software. You cannot
recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or
incidental damages.

That said, I hope liferay.com will more use principles of agile methodology like scrum and commit to quality and dates first instead of adding more new features and delaying. Commit to quality and dates rather than features.

This is how I'm developing with liferay.
I'm relating a user story to a portlet. A business function an user wants is expressed as a portlet on a page. A user can add, update, and delete these business functions depending on his/her needs. End users's system needs are decomposed into user stories which are expressed by portlets on a page. We have qualified scrum masters and refining on our development methodology. I do hope liferay.com will do the same. :-)

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 6:20 AM

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Gaurav Jain

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 141

Join Date: January 31, 2011

Well said Hitoshi. I agree.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 9:41 AM

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LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Liferay Legend

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Join Date: August 7, 2006

Nicely interpreted Juan. There's always room for improvement and without people expressing their pain points we can only guess what we should improve on.

Bill wants comments in the code but I think what he really wants is explained code samples on how to use the API.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 10:05 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Join Date: September 1, 2006

Mika Koivisto:

Bill wants comments in the code but I think what he really wants is explained code samples on how to use the API.

Not true, Mika. Knowing what the API needs is only half the battle. If you're trying to figure out, for example, the calls from the XxxLocalServiceUtil class all the way through to your XxxLocalServiceImpl method and back, the API documentation doesn't help you a bit. Internal code documentation is the only thing that gets you there, and Bill is totally right that there is nothing in there. Part of this particular example is that you're talking about the code generated by Service Builder, sure, but there's the whole foundation stuff based upon BasePersistenceImpl and BaseModel, etc., that you need to read code to understand.

Certainly there are many points in Liferay where just having the API documentation should be enough. But sometimes digging into the code itself is necessary to understand why the invocation of that API does not have the expected result.

And sometimes the API documentation is incomplete - I remember recently I was investigating why some code to add a new user via the API was failing with some NPEs. The API documentation didn't say that the OpenID field for addUser() was required, so I was using null (since I'm not using OpenID). Had to dig into the code to see that yes, a null isn't allowed but an empty string would work.

And once you dig into the bowels of the Liferay code, you quickly can see Bill's point, there is little if any javadoc in there to explain methods, args, etc. As far as self-documenting code it does do that rather well, but having that javadoc comment for all classes, members, and methods is still a necessity.

Honestly I don't know how you guys, as a development team, can really work on the code at all. I expect Brian knows the code like the back of his hand, but for any other new Liferay developer they must be left to read the code and follow the trails it lays out w/o any javadoc to fall back upon...

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 11:21 AM

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LIFERAY STAFF

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What you are describing can and should be solved with good javadocs and code samples. Only core engineers and contributors should need to read and understand the code behind the API.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 11:47 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Mika Koivisto:

What you are describing can and should be solved with good javadocs and code samples. Only core engineers and contributors should need to read and understand the code behind the API.

That's the rub, though. Since API documentation is sometimes missing, sometimes incomplete, and sometimes lack good code samples, the code is the only source for such information.

And that's a really narrow view of who should be in the source code. Anyone doing 3rd party integration of custom authentication tools, CMS systems, etc., also would have legitimate needs to be in the source in order to figure out the best and cleanest way to do the integration. There are other viable use cases for folks who need to understand how the code actually works that are neither core engineers nor contributors.

I demand my developers include javadoc for all public and protected classes, members, and methods. It ensures that we at least have some documentation for the internals and allows new developers added to the team to get up to speed a lot quicker.

If the Liferay shared the same view, the arguments about missing documentation would be significantly reduced.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 12:05 PM

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LIFERAY STAFF

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I do agree with you that developers should include javadoc and even comments in all non trivial code but if you've ever contributed any code with all that you usually see all that stripped away in a source formatting commit because it wasn't grammatically correct or something. Large number of Liferay engineers are non native English speakers so all javadocs are reviewed by our documentation team for good grammar and correctness that's why they are slowly added. The whole Liferay code base follows certain patterns in formatting and naming and once you learn those it's really easy to read and find code. For a newbie in Liferay it's not so easy so that's why having good api documentation with code samples is what I think we should concentrate our efforts in. Most people used to closed source products don't even want to read the source code.

Your example is in my opinion a bug. If blank is accepted but null causes a nullpointer then someone hasn't done their parameter checking.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 12:43 AM

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MICHAIL MOUDATSOS

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 106

Join Date: October 4, 2011

Mika Koivisto:

if you've ever contributed any code with all that you usually see all that stripped away in a source formatting commit because it wasn't grammatically correct or something. Large number of Liferay engineers are non native English speakers so all javadocs are reviewed by our documentation team for good grammar and correctness that's why they are slowly added.

Hmmm! I always thought (and excuse me if it sounds nasty but this is the real world) that comments were stripped out on purpose, in order to enhance a bit the need to turn to EE suport, etc. Well, these guys must be compensated somehow for their hard work, don't they? So, it is good to hear that there is indeed another more practical than commercial reason for this. However, my thoughts still hold for in-code comments. I can't think for a more fitting explanation - as I said before this is the real world!

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 1:46 AM

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Mazhar Alam

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 179

Join Date: November 25, 2011

Yaa..exactly..where is BILL..???

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 5:18 AM

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Mazhar Alam:

Yaa..exactly..where is BILL..???

Bill was a troll. We've fed him, so now he'll lie in wait for another day when he can start another firestorm...

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 8:05 AM

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Sampsa Sohlman

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 183

Join Date: September 27, 2007

Mazhar Alam:

Yaa..exactly..where is BILL..???

He got some answers for sure and I bet he had read this messages emoticon

May be he was just being troll, frustrating of something of LR. Anyway good discussion and he still can join.

Negative comments are usually better are more beneficial than good ones, like when you are partisipating scum's retrospective emoticon

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 5:17 AM

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MICHAIL MOUDATSOS:

Mika Koivisto:

I thought that, too, until we got EE and could see in the EE source that there is little if any javadoc there, too.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 5:39 AM

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MICHAIL MOUDATSOS

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 106

Join Date: October 4, 2011

David H Nebinger:

I thought that, too, until we got EE and could see in the EE source that there is little if any javadoc there, too.

I see...
Well, one can still argue that they have in-line comments etc, kept for their core development team, but since an EE license includes (if I'm not mistaken) consulting and so on, the only good reason I could think of is to prevent from comments leaking out to community (which would in turn, compromise the whole "keep those for us, so we are needed" idea...). Anyway, that's why we all post day by day; in order to fill bit by bit, all the missing stuff one could need. emoticon

(Am I not inspiring? emoticon

)

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 11:23 AM

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LIFERAY STAFF

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Join Date: August 7, 2006

I can assure you there's no secret source code that is more commented than the CE or EE code.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 10, 2012 3:18 PM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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I can assure you there's no secret source code that is more commented than the CE or EE code.

From the looks of it, I don't think there is either. From the information I've seen, EE still have some bugs when it is released but
Liferay.com is providing patches afterwards.

I think what developers wants is more documentations intact regardless of the grammerical quality.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 10, 2012 3:22 PM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Well, these guys must be compensated somehow for their hard work, don't they?

Agree on this. This is a off topic, but that's why I don't think we should be answering to questions pertaining only to EE here because that'll erode their business. Just stick with CE questions here and let liferay.com sell their support to EE users. They're giving us a good software to use, so at least let them do their business.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 10, 2012 10:11 PM

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Danny Stevens

Rank: New Member

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Join Date: September 14, 2011

The question of in depth javadoc is the biggest issue that Bill raised.

I would suggest comparing the javadoc for java itself with that of Liferay.

For developers to work with an API it is never enough to understand it in general, it has to be understood in detail. The evidence that this is true is the number of discussions in the liferay community where people are asking how to do things and a Liferay engineer answers with "well of course you use xxxxUtil.methodzzzz()" as if the questioner had any way to know this without being told.

At the very least the service layer APIs should have contract documentation for all method signiatures. At best they would also have some use case documentation. The javadoc can have links to extended documentation on this site if really needed but package layer documentation in javadoc would be better. The code for 6.1 service layer does show some bare minimum documentation, which is excellent. However it does not tend to provide valid ranges for parameters or use cases that would clarify. For example com.liferay.portal.service.UserLocalServiceUtil.dynamicQuery(DynamicQuery, int, int, OrderByComparator). Why is this part of the User service? Can the query only be about users? Are only user records returned? Can the OrderByComparator be null (this is given in the javadoc, the answer is yes)? Can you specify the upper and lower bound to be "give me everything"? How would you do that?

Where there is bad grammar I would rather you just place a flag in the javadoc that will bring someone to eventually fix it up and leave the untidy javadoc in place. It will be better than no javadoc at all.

As for the need of only core engineers to know about deeper things, that may be true in most cases, but many of us need to write utilities. For example I am writing a portal instance export/import system so that we can split a monolithic liferay with over 80 instances into four portals with 20 instances, all in shards. To do this I have to understand the counter services which has proved to be quite difficult. See http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/16004741

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 5:41 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Liferay also provides development training and consulting services as well.

I'm sure you're not working for free and if you're not providing your software source code to the public, I don't really think you have a valid point to complain about. If you don't want to use your own time to study by yourself, pay for education. I haven't heard too much about private universities not providing their education for free.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 9:24 AM

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jj olla

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Join Date: September 12, 2012

Hitoshi Ozawa:

I haven't heard too much about private universities not providing their education for free.

Actually, there are many big name universities offering free courses, including from MIT, Harvard, Berkely, Stanford :
http://ocw.mit.edu , http://edx.org , http://coursera.org , just to get you started

The point about lack of documentation is valid. It is not fair to claim it is "open source" if you are going to obfuscate the code before you put it out. Although obviously not at this extreme, I am sure Liferay.com is conscious that their code is sufficiently difficult to read that the EE support becomes the only way forward.

This is the fundamental prob with "Community Editions" .. when comparing to proper .org contributions.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 11:22 AM

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Brian Kim

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Expert

Posts: 312

Join Date: August 16, 2004

The point about lack of documentation is valid. It is not fair to claim it is "open source" if you are going to obfuscate the code before you put it out. Although obviously not at this extreme, I am sure Liferay.com is conscious that their code is sufficiently difficult to read that the EE support becomes the only way forward.

This is the fundamental prob with "Community Editions" .. when comparing to proper .org contributions.

At a Server Side conference dating back to 2005 or 2006 (I forget), one of the questions was whether we were going to have documentation for our product. At the time, we were probably less than 10 people and were obviously constrained by our own limitations. We're always trying to improve our documentation, but the truth is that it takes time to do this right. Take a look at our Liferay in Action book - that took over a year to actually complete. In parallel, we also made sure to beef up our Documentation pages.

Contrary to what you think, we're actually doing our best to make documentation better and are by no means trying to make reading the source code difficult to read. If that were the case, you'd see a lot of spaghetti code everywhere, super long method names, or even code that spills to 180 columns. And to be honest, if we were in the business of making our source code hard to read on purpose, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be in business in the years to come because people wouldn't want to use us. We've hired guys to add Javadocs to our source code, but that takes time too. Please be patient with us, we're doing our best.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 3:20 PM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Join Date: March 23, 2010

Brian left some facts out. To be fair, I'll fill it in.

Liferay.com used to sell their documentations including administrative guides.
They, nevertheless, have "seen the light" and are now providing their documentations online.

So, it's true the Liferay.com was trying to make money by selling their documentations but many other projects do it.
I'll also add in that what Liferay.com was selling is less then the current online documentations. So, I don't think it's
true that they are still trying to sell EE by not offering documentations.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 5:05 PM

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Brian Kim

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Posts: 312

Join Date: August 16, 2004

Actually, to clarify even further, we only used to charge for the hard copy versions of our administrator guides, and that's because we used a third-party publishing company. The soft copy version was always free.

You might be thinking of Liferay in Action, which is something you do have to purchase, and that's because we worked with Manning Publications Co. to ensure that we delivered a higher-quality book than what is out there by other publishers. But we were and are still committed to continually improving the online documentation, because the truth is, we're not trying to build a business selling documentation. =)

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 13, 2012 12:16 AM

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Johan de jong

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 26

Join Date: February 6, 2012

What is the problem with Liferay's documentation?

WHAT IS THE REAL PROBLEM?

Main problem is that everyone is trying to gain profit on liferay, and some are doing this by copying the java-docs to their server. This has resulted in tons of Google-hits on the first google pages for the same java-doc stored on different servers.
So if you want to know how a specific function "functions" and you search for it on google, you have to skip the first 200 results because they are all the same.

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it. Sorry guys... this is not highschool were you can send your dad to, to complain about a teacher.
If you can't get something running, it is you. only you that fails.

If Liferay was document to the max, a lot of us wouldn't make any money with their job emoticon

If anybody would post the construction of their portlet we all could benefit, but who benefits of the portlet...

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 13, 2012 5:01 AM

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Jelmer Kuperus

Rank: Liferay Legend

Posts: 1187

Join Date: March 10, 2010

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it

Everytime i see a comment like this i am compelled to google the posters name to verify if it isn't really James indulging himself in some astroturfing.
Having used Liferay for a significant amount of time I just simply cannot phantom someone having a high opinion of it.

Must be this stockholm syndrom thing or something..

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 13, 2012 11:19 AM

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Linus Sphinx

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 84

Join Date: August 12, 2010

jelmer kuperus:

Liferay is a superb platform, but you need to spend time on it

Sit down and write your own portal with all of the features of Liferay and get back to me on that would you please?

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 2:46 PM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Join Date: March 23, 2010

Yes, to some but not all courses. So liferay.com is making CE available for free and charging for EE like these institutions are providing some free courses and charging for others. Institutions also need money to operate as liferay.com.

Well, I don't have any trouble now and I only have CE and haven't taken any liferay.com's training. There are now more documentations now compared to when I started so it should be easier now.
I don't know why I can and why you can't.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 3:13 PM

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Jack Bakker

Rank: Expert

Posts: 298

Join Date: January 3, 2010

Interesting how attractive the subject of this thread is. Initially I was annoyed but this thread has solicited much contribution - albeit some via mindless braindump.

And on that note:

I personally am appreciative of having so much opensource and freeware available, including Liferay CE. Just looking at all the opensource libraries involved shows just how cool an assembly Liferay really is.

Yeah things can improve and evolve including wrt documentation. Not being that good at documentation myself, I am in awe of many who try and also am in awe of those like David and Hitoshi and others who take the time to help people along.

Code being difficult to read ? The more I review Liferay code, the more I learn about what good coding and architecture is.

But perhaps I am going off topic... and back to work I go...

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 11:54 AM

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Rank: Liferay Legend

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Join Date: September 1, 2006

Mika Koivisto:

What you are describing can and should be solved with good javadocs and code samples. Only core engineers and contributors should need to read and understand the code behind the API.

I defy you to find anywhere, in any of the liferay.com documentation, forum, javadocs, etc. an indication of what can and cannot be passed for the open id in the call to UserLocalServiceUtil.addUser().

No where will you see that it cannot be null. If you pass null you get a totally unhelpful stack trace with an NPE. Digging into the code to find the NPE is the only way to identify that the open id cannot be null, that some value (even an empty string) is required.

That's just a single example. I'm sure all of us here on the forum can pull up examples from our past where we had to dig into the code itself to solve a problem because there was just no other documentation to cover it.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 7, 2012 2:46 AM

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Aad Nales

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 25

Join Date: January 5, 2012

David H Nebinger:

Not that i will defy you! I completely agree that the lack of API documentation is making the learning curve not just steep but almost unsurmountable. I am not talking about using Liferay but programming on top of it. What can we do as a community to improve this? I really think that the we need to step up the efforts from "outside" programmers to improve the quality. Earlier in the thread i already referred to our efforts to improve the quality of Liferay CE with the start of a patchers community. How do we get better API documentation? Is there a way to share the burden and make it worth our while for all?

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 1:28 PM

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Andew Jardine

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 96

Join Date: December 22, 2010

I once saw an interview with Eminem after one of his album releases. The interviewer asked him how he felt about a crap ton of parents saying that he should be jailed for his lyrics and how offensive they felt they were etc. I thought his answer was awesome. He said --

"You don't like what I have to say? Don't listen. That's your choice."

... I think that same philosophy can be carried on here. You don't like Liferay, great, work with something else. Personally, I'd like to see the portal framework that Bill has built that is better.

Unfortuantely, in my career I have nearly always inheritted someone elses sh*t. From what I have seen, it's rarely the product that is crap but rather some sad developers interpretation of it that makes it difficult to use and frustrating.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 2:00 PM

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Johan de jong

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 26

Join Date: February 6, 2012

LOL, i was thinking about liferay the same some months ago.

But i didn't give up, and today i think it is the only portal/webserverbase that is can do anything and everything.

IT IS FREAKING AWESOME !!

AND DO NOT START ABOUT JOOMLA!

Joomla is hacked every 2 weeks and have you ever seen their code?
ever tried to discover their enormous amount of php classes?
ever tried to install a plugin and had your whole installation wrecked?
ever tried to install a plugin and then found out that all security within the site has been overruled?
pfff....

I create PHP portlets within minutes that use 40% Liferay functionality and 60% PHP. i dont have do bother about useraccounts, rights, security or that my system gets hacked by a PHP leakage.

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 6, 2012 11:56 PM

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sheela mk

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 90

Join Date: February 16, 2012

Where is Bill Hillston emoticon

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 12, 2012 11:35 AM

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Linus Sphinx

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 84

Join Date: August 12, 2010

Pradeep Pandey:

Hey Hillston
It may be hard for you to understand.".what is liferay". If you want to survive in IT industries then You have to do smart work not hard work

Some real good advice there.

"It is a poor craftsman indeed who blames his tools."

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RE: Liferay sucks!!

September 13, 2012 11:46 AM

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James Falkner

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Liferay Master

Posts: 975

Join Date: September 17, 2010

I believe this thread has run its course, so am closing it. I want to thank Bill his thoughts and everyone else for keeping things civil! Cheers!