I just wanted to start a thread regarding Liferay and cloud computing environments. I'm wondering about the issues of running Liferay in a cloud computing environment such as:

• Amazon EC2
• Google App Engine

I'm especially interested in low cost cloud environments such as Google App Engine - for a small fry developer such as myself, it would be nice to have free usage up to a certain quota. I'm also interested in platform as a service offerings making it easy for me to install and get my application going. I would expect Liferay not to work on GAE as it is currently configured - unless someone can state otherwise.

Hi!

From my expereince I do not see any problem with running Liferay on Amazon EC2 (of course, prepeare full-functional AMI require some additional effort).

But I'm very skeptic about Liferay on GAE - major problem I see here - is database level: Liferay strongly related to Hibernate, and GAE provided JPA & JDO interfaces to store data. Plus, GAE has limited support for JPA (not all features are supported) - mostly it is because it has non-SQL database in background.

But, in any case it will be very interesting to see any results in this direction. If you like - I can try to provide some support in this job

Hi!

Using some external DB - probably a way, but, without using own Google DB - I don't think running Liferay in GAE will have any practical reason - since, even with using scalability on Application-Server level (with using GAE) - we will lost it's scalability on DB level (provided then GAE DB is used)

Anyway - it is very interesting project and I will be happy to see any positive result!

Good luck in your job!

With best regards,
Alexey Kakunin

Isn't Liferay moving to JPA soon - and in theory, shouldn't that work with Google DB then?

Hmm, thanks for the info. I'm actually planning to use IceFaces rather than RichFaces. Nevertheless, are there any issues with Seam and Liferay I should know about? Liferay has been extremely vague in this area. Liferay says it's compatible with Seam, but I have to wonder if there are any issues with scope (conversation, etc.), page actions, etc. And I'm also planning to use JBpm and JBoss Cache. Maybe I'm getting myself in too deep with all these dependencies?

Thanks for the link. I just tried the Exadel/Seam/Liferay demo and it does not work for me either. I cannot perform a search. Yikes. I wish someone from Liferay could write about this issue. I certainly don't want to use JBoss Portal and I want to keep using IceFaces. Hopefully, the new WebBeans spec will force everyone to adopt the Seam-like features and things will be much more compatible in the future - but it would still be nice to have Seam compatibility right now (who knows WebBeans will be fully implemented...).

It was an exercise in futile. Inspite of repeated attempts we could not succeed in putting LR on GAE.

For any help feel free to contact me,

Ahmed Hasan
CTO, TransIT mPower Labs (P) Ltd.
info@mpowerglobal.com
mPower Global Inc.
A Liferay expert company.

is the liferay ami publicly available?

Hi Alexey,

It looks as though the Liferay/Seam/Richfaces portal is working again at the link you gave me... So that's a good sign.

BTW, I've been looking into Liferay 5.2.3/Seam 2.2 GA/ICEfaces 1.8.2/Facelets/JBoss 5.0.0GA (I'm not using the Liferay supplied JBoss package, but just following the instructions given in the administration guide to put the Liferay wars into JBoss 5 and the other instructions) and have gotten it to work. I used the Seam component showcase Liferay/JBoss deployment example in ICEfaces 1.8.2 as a template. I also used Seam gen to generate the war project - and after only making a few changes, I was able to get things to work.

I've been pleasantly surprised how well things are going. I'm doing a preliminary investigation on it and things seem to be working. Conversation propagation seems to be working fine - I used a simple example to test. I put <begin-conversation join="true"/> in my <page_name>.pages.xml file for the subsequent page. (Page navigation using pages.xml or <page_name>.pages.xml seems to be working). I have a button that executes a simple action that goes to the next page for the portlet. I check the conversation ID as I move from the first page to the second page and the conversation ID stays the same. So far, everything is working fine. I'm sure page parameters won't work because of the need to do POST requests instead of GET requests, but I can live without that feature for now. But simple things seem to be working fine. I'm sure as I go further along I'll find a few bugs, but I am pleasantly surprised for now. I have some hope.

Yes, 5.3 should support JPA, but I'm still very sceptic about it - reading current documetation - only EclipseLink supported as JPA provider (even Hibernate is not working) - so, not sure it will work with GAE JPA provider - since it have too many restrictions

Focus on it!!

Hi Jessica,

Liferay should work on Amazon (AWS) from what people have been describing. We have support for JBoss, MySQL, we use Lucene, we hook into Alfresco, and Google Analytics should work fine. So all in all, I don't see why this wouldn't work Eclipse/Netbeans would be a strictly developer-side thing and not related to the server, but both of those have been used very commonly with liferay as well. We also have a Liferay IDE now, which is simply eclipse with a specialized Liferay development plugin hook.

Good luck with setting up the stack!

Warm regards,
Sam