Re: Liferay portal -- WEB400

Booth,

Your post touched on quite a few subjects. Any one them would be interesting to discuss. My first inclination was to reply to the topic of themes and how Liferay implements them. That would be an interesting technical discussion, but may not carry as much weight as say security, for example.

I think the gist of your post implies correctly, that for Web applications to move beyond brochure-ware, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business contexts, then there needs to be some essential infrastructure, supplied by a portal. There may be hundreds of applications in a comprehensive ERP system, and even hundreds of different roles for thousands of different users, and it takes quite a bit of infrastructure to support that type of use. It's one thing to provide infrastructure that supports a few applications, but another to support hundreds or even thousands of applications under a shared context. It's not just many users accessing a few applications. It's potentially many users accesing many applications.

One reason that OS/400 took off in the late eighties was because it provided that kind of support for developers, system integrators, and end-users. The challenge now is to come up with that kind of structure for Web applications, as an alternative to 5250.

Nathan.

----- Original Message ----
From: Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 11:28:12 AM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Liferay portal

Please understand where I am coming from, Nathan. I admit to being an
AS/400 bigot. I like the platform and it has given me a good career so
far. I love the green screen and its ease of use for everyone. I would
love to spend the rest of my career writing subfiles.

But I guess thats not to be. So I went looking. A friend pointed me at
Liferay and here are the things I like.

I can use it as is. I can change it. It appears that building themes,
colors, and look and feel are manageable and relatively easy to build an
inventory for users. It looks like there are a lot of built-in features
that would take a single programmer forever to duplicate. Examples
would include security, messaging, and calendering. It also looks like
building portlets can be done, and they can be added to the application
inventory. That appeals to me because I really do want the ability to
build new applications without having to rebuild the desktop every time,
or have to create every user desktop as a programmer's task.

On the other hand, I haven't been able to do it yet. It says I can, it
looks like I can. But it ain't happened.

My real hands-on goal is to have a portal with a portlet that is a
snazzy looking graph of something, anything, which is based on i5 data,
and automatically changes when the i5 data changes.

I installed the package on my PC and it isn't tedious or slow. My
thinking is that the liferay.net server is slow for some reason. Maybe
they need bigger pipes or an i5?