Liferay or GateIn

Question

Now our team is facing new project - creation of new company's intranet portal. Because of some reasons we are considering java open source portals and deciding between Liferay and GateIn.

One of very important requirements is following: portal representation for users must depend on country/language settings of customer computer, it means not only portlets localization but users in US subsidiaries of the company should see probably other structure than users in France. Is it possible to implement the requirement in Liferay and GateIn?.

Answer 1

This can definitely be achieved through Liferay. Please have a look at the concepts of creating organisations.

Am not sure if this can be done in GateIn. However, there are many other things that you may need to keep in mind before choosing these Portals. I have tried to mention few of them here.

1. Check the stability of the Portal server that you will choose to run on a particular Container. GateIn initially was unstable.

2. You may have to override few files (for your customization) if required. GateIn uses GTMPL view technology for the same. Check how good are you in this. In this case, Liferay is easier (Liferay doesn't use any GTMPL UI framework)

3. Apart from developing a location based Portal, if you are also trying to achieve other things like fully Ajax based pages, a good UI framework (like JSF) etc then check if the Portal server you are choosing runs on a particular Container which supports Ajax, JSF (latest versions)

Above were few and list may grow. But, to conclude I would suggest to go for Liferay :)

Answer 2

This can be achieved with Gatein at different level :

• Sites : you can declare multiple sites running on the same portal instance(sharing same User Base). In this case you can automatically redirect user to different country sites, based on the country/language of the user.

• Sites Navigations : Gatein provides portal, group and user navigations. Navigation is created dynamically when a user connects to the portal. You can have only websites, navigation will created dynamically by user (based on group and user permissions).

• Pages (Dynamics layout rendering): GateIn renders each page dynamically. A page is composed of multiple containers that contains portlets or gadgets. By setting permissions on each container and by using User Group or Membership of the connected user, it's possible to have different page layout.

Of course, you can also mixed these 3 approaches to build your portal.

Answer 3

Liferay is very buggy, and community is very bad. Unless you pay the support.

GateIn promises much, but still lacks functionality.

Answer 4

You may consider JBoss Juzu and Apache Struts to develop generic portlets in order to void any portal vendor lock-in.

Struts provides features of internationalization, localization, timezones achieve my project.

I make use of struts2-portlet plugin to achieve a reporting portlet running on multiple portals. Here is my sample: code.google.com/p/jasperrocks/wiki/Features