Liferay Portal Training Application Development

Our client was a travel agency in Australia. In 2007, the client’s business started to grow rapidly and the management team decided to expand their business from Australia to Asia. The project manager (client side) wanted to provide a training software application for new sales reps which could help salesman to enhance their work ability. Their current Intranet, which developed six years ago in PHP and the LAMP stack, cannot satisfy the new business needs, so the system needed to be updated to fit new technologies and requirements. Liferay Portal was introduced to the project by our website developers.

Liferay portal is a free and open source enterprise portal written in Java and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Liferay runs on any computing platform capable of running the Java Runtime Environment and an application server. Website developers can use Liferay portal to set up robust features common to websites easily. With pop-up box, it offers user registration, captcha, document library, lucene-based search, wikis, news feeds, social chat, and other functionalities. Website developers can add new features or customize Liferay’s behavior and appearance. Sometimes, Liferay is described as a content management framework or a web application framework because of this plug-in extensibility and modular design. Liferay supports multiple programming languages, including support for PHP and Ruby portlets.

We built a development team consisted of an architect, a business analyst, 2 developers, one QA engineer and a PM (project manager). Our development team adopted Liferay Portal technology which provided many mature frameworks and developed instances. The development team implemented the project based on the PMI framework. The project included software evaluation, the deployment of user authentication (connecting with their corporate LDAP database), a wiki portal for knowledge sharing, an internal Jabber server for IM and the customization of the look and feel of the portal software. And the team designed the following application architecture:

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