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Any recommendation to to go with Spring Portlets with Liferay server or Websphere Portlet Factory? I am assuming Websphere portlet factory solution expedites portlet development BUT NOT sure from maintenance point of view. Any personal experience utilising these two technology stacks?

Additional information: We have good knowledge of spring MVC and we already have corporate license for Websphere portlet factory.

anonmys
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In my experience, WebSphere Portlet Factory might be alright for putting together a lot of cookie-cutter portlets, but is awful to debug. You don't have direct access to the code that it generates, so, when you see stack traces in that code, its difficult to figure out what's going on.

Moreover, you end up being very limited to whatever that within WPF's paradigm, and things get tough when you have to do something outside of its boundaries. You get a lot more flexibility with Spring Portlet MVC, including the advantage that the skills you are using have application outside of the strict, portal context.

Spike Williams
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  • In actual real life scenarios, it is lot to do with the you organization. For an organization with websphere, generally we tend to have a lot of pressure from higher management to use Rapid Application development for faster delivery which in turn lead to use these tools. I totally agree with you about the drawback of RAD application vs a well designed application. – anonmys Mar 22 '11 at 18:02
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The problem with any portal framework is that they lock you in with their custom extensions whenever you venture outside JSR 168 (and you'll want to).

I think you'll minimize lockin with Liferay.

Another suggestion would be to forego portlets altogether and use HTML, CSS, and Ajax. You won't be locked into a vendor that way.

Portlets are so 1990s. What are they really buying you?

duffymo
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  • How does using front-end technologies (HTML,CSS,AJAX) prevent the need for a portal framework? Aren't they completely different things? – James Goodwin Feb 23 '11 at 19:51
  • They are completely different things? I don't think that portals are necessary. The same things can be done without a WebSphere portal server: http://myiosoft.com/products/AjaxPortal/demo/ – duffymo Feb 23 '11 at 23:41
  • Absolutely, I still cannot understand why these enterprise architects are behind us to use portal technology just because the UI team is looking for a UI something similar to what portal technology provide. One can easily implement such a UI using AJAX and you provided a good example for it. – anonmys Feb 24 '11 at 16:19
  • Enterprise architects tend to be people who like to impose tools on others and don't actually have to use them. I say: Let the workman choose his tools. – duffymo Feb 25 '11 at 02:19
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    This great technology which can easily achieved by some AJAX stuff is a billion dollar industry, thanks to Enterprise Architects and decision makers. – anonmys Feb 28 '11 at 17:10