Upgrading Liferay

The great part about using a solution such as Liferay is that not only is it open source but there is a company dedicated to supporting the software. This means that during the time of our deployment Liferay made significant improvements to the software and released additional functionality. We upgraded the software at Endeca and it immediately improved performance and gave them an increased efficiency in the ability to integrate their own software portlets into the portal framework. This upgrade had challenges however; moving from 4.2.2 to 4.3.2 in the time we did (less than a month) required complete regression testing and plenty of time should be allotted for this type of activity. The changes made by Liferay were to the overall architecture of the software. This however, was a very good change long term; the previous version depended on Enterprise Java Beans for application communication the current version allows you, or third party companies to deploy Java war files for module add-ons. This means you can now easily share your application as portlets within the Liferay community and you now have improved access to applications developed by others. The integration of these portlets is now very easy. This exemplifies the spirit of community based solutions and the open source business model and it’s easy to see the business and technical benefits it provided us on this project.