It's been so long since I've written anything, I've been fealing rather guilty. Luckly recently we've been undertaking a huge effort to document features of Liferay, old and new. One interesting but highly understated feature of Liferay 6.1 is the new Faceted Search support that I was lucky enough to get to work on. As I finished the first round of documentation (for my more...
Read More About Faceted Search in Liferay 6.1 »

.portlet-blogs pre {white-space: pre-wrap !important;} Liferay has long had the ability to embed portlets in themes. This is convenient for implementors to get highly functional design into the look and feel of a site. In my years at Liferay I've seen and heard many different attempts at doing this with various levels of success. There are a number of things to consider when embedding...
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  Spring's dependency injection framework is the picture of ubiquity in the java world. As such it aims to drive developers toward declarative, component driven design and lose coupling. But, it is largely a static container. The class space is flat and once started there is little means for dynamic change.   OSGi is "the" modularity framework for java. It...
Read More About Introducing Arkadiko, a bridge between Spring and OSGi »

I've taken to using github.com 's gist service quite alot recently and so I wanted to just spread the word that there are some handy nuggets appearing there. Here's the url  https://gist.github.com/rotty3000 . Examples: list open and accessible sites (that a user could join, or may already be part of) a simple localization hook embed navigation tag...
Read More About Random Liferay Code Snippets »

Over the past several months I've been working on integrating an OSGi framework into Liferay Portal. The reasons for doing so are varied but include solutions to app server/servlet container dependency, library version conflicts, runtime module lifecycle, advanced extensibility, and so on. If you are not familliar with OSGi, I recommend visiting the OSGi web site , and in particular...
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