Hello,

I am pleased to announce a new podcast on JSF Central. In this podcast JSF Central editor-in-chief Kito D. Mann interviews Neil Griffin about Liferay, Ajax, and ICEfaces. This was recorded in September of 2008 at JSFOne.

Here is an excerpt:

Kito:   Okay, interesting. So we talked a little bit about Liferay and ICEfaces. Why don't you tell us exactly what Liferay is?

Neil:   Liferay is a portal server. Some people like to call portals, portal servers. I like to call them portlet containers. What it does is it implements the JSR 168 spec, which is portlet 1.0, and it also now implements JSR 286, which is portlet 2.0. What you can do is you can write portlets, which are rectangular regions of content. You can aggregate them on a page. The theory behind portals is that you can take different portlets and aggregate them to create a composite application.

Kito:  Okay, so how does this compare to... let's say I built a web application and I just wanted to have some regions and I just put some IFRAME on the page or something.

Neil:   A lot of people actually try to implement portals like that, where they will have different regions that are just IFRAMEs pointing elsewhere. There are a couple of different answers to that question. First of all, the one benefit that the portal provides is that it often has a single sign on or type of authentication engine that manages users and things like that. Oftentimes it comes with a lot of portlets out of the box. A lot of times people will build their own home grown portals with IFRAMEs. Each IFRAME is simply just displaying a news article or something like that. So portals like Liferay will have a portlet that enables content management. You can define your content in a what you see is what you get environment right there in the portal. Then once you have placed that content in the CMS you can drag and drop the rendered content, these portlets, anywhere on the page and build a whole website without using a tool like Dreamweaver.

Read the full article or download the podcast here:Neil Griffin discusses Liferay and ICEfaces

Kito D. Mann -- Author, JavaServer Faces in Action

http://twitter.com/kito99  http://twitter.com/jsfcentral

http://www.virtua.com - JSF/Java EE consulting, training, and mentoring

http://www.JSFCentral.com - JavaServer Faces FAQ, news, and info

1 203-404-4848 x3