I have found that using Liferay as a base for applications decreases development time so significantly that it's hard for me to justify building any new projects as stand alone applications. The benefit of a pre-built login, roles, users, CMS, etc etc... allows me to focus on the specifics on the application. So, my question is what are the types of applications that would work better if built as a stand alone application?

I wouldn't do a game in Liferay ;-)

Seriously though, I'm not sure there isn't anything web-based that you cannot do under the Liferay umbrella, at least for new development.

Porting of standalone apps to the portal environment, that's another story all-together. It can be fun trying to adapt some of the JS libraries, code, etc. to work under Liferay...

ha..yeah, I'm guessing developing a game within the system would be a challenge.

I was trying to see if there is some sort of outline anyone follows...I guess it would be if your application requires such specific requirements that getting the system to work with it would be more work than creating it as a stand alone app. Anyway, I was just curious to see if there were something specific I wasn't thinking of...

Any heavy flash-based app is probably not an easy fit as I think it is often necessary to manually build the bridge interface between the flash app on the front end and services on the back end.

How are you developing your applications?

Liferay is developing using agile methods. Portlets are business services and service builder generates data (entity) services.

If you're trying to develop in a traditional waterfall type method where each phase consists of developing software in system layer, liferay is not the way to go. If you developers only know one technology and each phase of the development process is passed to another group, liferay may not be it.

If you're developing system using agile method where business services are developed in phases and users would need to "see" the output of each business service developed
, I think liferay is it. Every developer would need to be able to design entities and develop java and jsp/javascript instead of just knowing one technology.

Liferay is just a tool. You'll have to change how you do your work if you want to gain benefit of using a new tool.

Most of my users want to start small and improve on it by adding new services and modifying existing ones. They are also interested in developing on the cloud (including private clouds). They want flexibility in the end user level or what end user can see.