I’m considering developing an application as portlets, to be integrated in Liferay portal. Are there any significant disadvantages or restrictions in developing such an application, as opposed to developing a normal web application using Spring framework?
Liferay seems to require that all content is added as portlets. Another option I ponder is to use Liferay just for some parts of the application and add external links to other self-developed content, developed as a normal web application. That would, however, create a need of multiple user authentication mechanisms and some kind of cross-site authentication between Liferay and the other web application.
Which is the best way to go?
(Disclaimer: I’m one of Liferay’s developers)
I think both options are good depending on your needs. If you have previous experience developing standalone web applications but no experience developing portlets, then picking the former will get you started faster. The drawbacks would be that you would have to implement your own users and permissions system and would not be able to leverage the portal services provided by Liferay. If you decide to use this alternative, note that you can deploy regular WAR files to Liferay and it will automatically create a simple portlet that uses an iframe to show your app. This will allow you to put the standalone app along with the portlets in Liferay’s pages.
Developing a portlet for Liferay starts to pay off when you start leveraging the portal services it provides. To start with by developing a portlet you can forget about developing your own user system and use the one that Liferay provides (which is quite powerful). You can also use other services such as permissions, comments, tagging, categorization, data scoping, etc. which will allow you to develop pretty complete application in a shorter time. The drawback is that the first time you do this you’ll have to learn several new things, but the second time you’ll go much faster.
I hope that helps.