Liferay offers several benefits over similar frameworks in the market: • Ease of use • Support for a wide variety of applications • Liberal licensing and open source code • Extensibility • Scalability • Internationalization support • Integration with other tools • Adherence to industry standards Ease of Use Like the Yahoo! portal, portals created using Liferay are easy to use. You can add variousapplications to portal pages by using Liferay’s drag-and-drop feature, and you can move themaround by clicking and dragging. You can remove an existing application from the page with asingle click on the close icon, and you can easily change the page layout by applying a differentpage template. You can also change the look and feel of a page by applying a theme providedby Liferay or third parties. So you can create a portal easily and allow the user to configure it asdesired. You can take advantage of all these features without writing a single line of code. Support for a Wide Variety of Applications Liferay provides a wide range of applications or portlets that you can use, including wikis,blogs, chat, and discussion forums, to name a few. In addition to these, you can incorporateapplications made available…

What Is a Portal? You have already encountered a web portal if you’ve used Yahoo!—one of the world’s bestknown and most-used portals. Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Music each aggregate the contents provided by their partners. This is exactly what a portal does: it provides a single point of entry to widely distributed information on the web, and itoffers a unified way to access that diverse information.Some portals allow users to decide what they want to display on their portal pages. Inmany of these cases, the portal designer will customize the user’s page contents and generate them dynamically. Regardless of whether the customization is done by the portal designer orthe user, portals provide an easy way to configure desired content on a personal web page.Plus, portals provide a consistent look and feel. Users can take advantage of diverse applicationsin the same manner, making it easy for them to access information from various sources.Now let’s look at the formal definition of a “portal.” If you search for “portal definition”on Google, you’ll pull up several definitions that all convey the same meaning. Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal), the popular free encyclopedia, provides thefollowing definition: A web portal is a site that provides a…