Project Description

This project would integrate the ability to create portlets specifically designed to use Adobe's Flex (Flash-based Web Application framework). http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ This would allow the portlets to have rich Flash content, and be able to display uniformly across all web browsers. A further development of this project may one day allow for the entire Liferay portal structure to be displayed in a single Flex container, but this is not the focus at this stage.

The second component of this project would allow for the use of Adobe's BlazeDS: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS So that the Flex framework will be able to access DAO Web Services from Liferay portal via Adobe's AMF protocol. These Liferay services would be generated AMF classes similar to the SOAP and JSON classes currently built by ServiceBuilder. This generation process could easily be integrated into the current ServiceBuilder process. And perhaps options can be added to select which versions of the generated services the developer wishes to be built.

Project Requirements/Objectives

1. The logistics of using these two technologies will first have to be fully analyzed to ascertain the true benefits, as well as the difficulties.

2. This should begin on a small scale with a few individual services and portlets, and grow from there.

Initial Project Scope

The initial scope is to implement individual portlets using this strategy. The future scope would possibly be to implement the entire Liferay portal with a Flex container, thus affording an enhanced and uniform visual style across all web browsers.

Discussion of Design/Implementation Approach

1. Analyze the functional efficiency of using Flex framework within a Liferay portal.

2. Test and analyze use of BlazeDS to access DAO objects from Liferay services.

3. Implement several individual service-portlet components completely using this paradigm, and test result.

4. Once stability is assured, integrate paradigm into core Liferay.

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