Tuesday, December 16, 2008

JBOSS Portal vs Liferay Portal

Feature Comparison
Feature Liferay(5.1+) JBoss Portal(2.7)
Out of the box Tools Has rich set of out of the box portlets Not too much out of the box portlets
Single Click configuration (altering a page layout, adding new applications and content, and changing look and feel can all be done in a couple of clicks) Supported Supported
Dynamic Drag and Drop(move different elements around in the portal by) Supported Supported
SSO Supported Supported
Role Based Authorization support Supported Supported
Communities and Organizations Liferay users can be intuitively grouped into a hierarchy of "organizations" or cross-organizational "communities," providing flexibility and ease of administration. Not Supported
Personal User Pages All users get a personal space that can be made public (published as a website with a unique friendly URL) or kept private. You can customize how the space looks, what tools and applications are included Not provided
Internationalization support Out of the box internationalization support provided for 22 languages. No out of the box internationalization support available
Wikis Provides robust wiki support Provided
Activity tracking Display most recent activity Not provided
Message Boards Supported (Can be very easily created) Supported
Instant Message Support A friends list automatically displays the names of all other logged-in portal users. If you have something to say, just IM them. Not provided
Alerts and Announcements Broadcast messages to different group of users whether they are simple announcements or "newsletter"-like in purpose Not provided
Blog Support Provided Not Provided
Calendar Rich calendar support(Can add events) Support
Password Policies Liferay provides flexible password policy through Enterprise Admin Portlet. you can apply different rule sets to different sets of portal users. Not Provided

Similarities

•Both are JSR-168 compliant.
•Both are open source.

Differences
•JBoss Portal can only be installed on Jboss application server whereas Liferay works in any J2EE container or servlet container.
•Liferay has been around longer than JBoss Portal.
•The CMS features are very minimal in JBoss Portal because all that one can do is create html pages using a rich text editor and do some file manipulation activities (create directory, move and copy files and so on.
•The CMS portlet in Liferay is more feature rich than that of JBoss in the sense that one can create custom content types and own templates. This helps separate content form its presentation. It is also very easy to create new pages and add them automatically to the navigation bar.
•Liferay has a larger portal community.
•Liferay has more enterprise clients that have run the portal for many years with hundreds of thousands of users.
•Liferay comes with many useful portlets so you don't have to configure much. But, it also has many external portlets and themes available. JBoss has fewer portlets.
•Though Liferay works with almost any application server, I have found users complaining about setup with any other AS take longer time. Whereas setting up JBoss Portal is a straightforward, three-step process of editing some configuration files, creating the database, and starting the portal. Reference
•Also people felt Liferay portal to be bit slow but stable.
•Liferay is under the MIT (similar to Apache/BSD) style license. JBoss is LGPL.

References
Liferay Vs JBoss
Portal Polls Survey
JBoss to Liferay Migration Reason
Liferay User Experience Customization
Liferay Technical Spec

Glossary:
•Out of the box: A ready-made software, hardware, or combination package that meets a need that would otherwise require a special development effort.

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