Liferay DXP & The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Since its high note inception; the lightweight open source enterprise portal Liferay has been successfully manifesting its capability of addressing the modern era business requirements. Its latest version Liferay DXP has assured beyond expectation delight form users, industries and developers. As a result, Liferay has secured the prestigious place in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Horizontal Portals.

The Good

The Best to Begin With

Liferay DXP runs with the organization’s existing IT environment at remarkably lower initial costs
It complies with and helps in defining new industry standards. – Liferay DXP Portal is compliant with all key industry standards (JSR-286, JSF-314, JSR-170, WSRP and JBI) and participated as a member of the “Portlet 2.0″ specification committee
Capable enough to get transpired as the optimum solution focused on search-enabled Content management and tactful knowledge management along with flawless user experience

Modularization

Due to support for OSGi modular based environment, modularization always has been one of the most significant and impactful aspect of Liferay DXP framework.

The development process is easy with enhanced performance of the application
Document storages has been extracted as modules such as Advanced Filesystem, CMIS, DB, Filesystem, JCR and S3 for better management

Higher Forms capabilities

Advance capabilities of forms such as:

Possibilities to split the form into multiple pages and originating the wizard- like forms
Ability to control the form layout and enablement of workflow for the particular form
Ability to populate a form dropdown (i.e. a Select field) with a REST Data Provider

All in all Assorted Advantages

Immense Database Support – From latest versions of MySQL, HSQLDB, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, Liferay DXP can work with number of databases and application servers. Hence, it offers increased flexibility and resourcefulness.
Continuous furtherance for speed – It holds the functionality of wherein the parts of a particular page that are required to be refreshed will only be refreshed. Liferay DXP is optimized for increased speed.
Navigation across Pages – Effective navigation panel that makes customization very easy for developers and the user finds all the applications are consolidated into a small but effective space. Empowered single page app development possibilities using various robust and adaptable functionalities

Flexibility to add Geo-location metadata not only to web contents or data lists but also to documents and media via Asset Publisher. Alloy editing is enabled for much user friendly and bug free editing. Templates are being supported for different modules that help the users in customization

Easy integration with Bootstrap 3 and other UI development frameworks leading to less code and more responsiveness ability for mobile first approach

The Bad

This highly acclaimed and much appreciated Digital experience platform itself does not have any major negative aspects. It depends on the requirements of proposed technology solution.

It is not the right solution for small size applications
It is not the right portal solution, if your application does a little various forms of contents

The Ugly

The little ugly side of Liferay DXP portal is lack of documentation and knowledge resources despite of active and efficient communities. This area is being worked upon though.
Clustering feature is not available for community edition as of now, Liferay has announced to add it in near future though

Conclusion

All in all, after the noteworthy enhancements of Liferay DXP have made this technology sufficient enough handle the modern day technological requirements as an enterprise portal solution. But, in IT sector, even the sky cannot be limit for further up gradations. After working with it for more than a decade, I look forward to Liferay DXP as a profoundly capable technological driving force for growth oriented enterprises.