If you are trying to build more than just a simple web application and you need features like look and feel, administration, search, emailing, content management then you want a portal. There are many open source and commercial JEE portals available such as Liferay, Open portal, JBoss, Web Center Portal, Web Sphere Portal etc. Liferay is a popular light weight open source portal. "Liferay Beginner's Guide" is a good book to get started if you want to learn Liferay by yourself. You can buy an electronic or paper copy here at Packt Publishing.
You can find lot of information about using Liferay with Tomcat on the internet but very less information when it comes to commerical application servers like WebLogic Server. This book explains on how to get started with Liferay on WebLogic Server using illustrations and screen shots. I am big fan of pictures and illustrations as they can speak 1000 words :-) The previous book I read on Liferay was very developer oriented and doesn't have interesting screenshots for someone who is new. But this book explains a topic with screen shots, instructions and expalins what we just did with a summary section titled "What just happpened". I believe that is a better approach to explain hard technical concepts. "Have a go here" section will engange you to experiment with the topics more practically.
Overall this books will get anyone who is new to Liferay started with all the major concepts and help you build a site to understand the concepts. You will also build a online shopping website practically which is very interesting. More interesting topic when you build the shopping website is the integration with the Paypal sandbox environment. Publishing and content management is one of the highlight for Liferay in addition to its portal features. This book explores all the content management features of Liferay which is useful for most business scenarios. Another strengh of Liferay is the built-in portlets that comes bundled with the product and thess discussion about those built-in portlets in this book. Enterprise Edition of Lifeay is bundled with more built-in portlets and this book discussed the Community edition of the Liferay for simplicity.
One of the best topic comes as the last chapter - Administration. It is crucial for anyone who works with the product to understand little bit about the server administration. Creating multiple sites, Virtual hosting, implementing staging environments, Configuring logs, Monitoring server and portal sessiona are key topcis being discussed.
Overall, this book is a good introduction to anyone who is new to Liferay. Download a sample chapter from this book here.
You can find lot of information about using Liferay with Tomcat on the internet but very less information when it comes to commerical application servers like WebLogic Server. This book explains on how to get started with Liferay on WebLogic Server using illustrations and screen shots. I am big fan of pictures and illustrations as they can speak 1000 words :-) The previous book I read on Liferay was very developer oriented and doesn't have interesting screenshots for someone who is new. But this book explains a topic with screen shots, instructions and expalins what we just did with a summary section titled "What just happpened". I believe that is a better approach to explain hard technical concepts. "Have a go here" section will engange you to experiment with the topics more practically.
Overall this books will get anyone who is new to Liferay started with all the major concepts and help you build a site to understand the concepts. You will also build a online shopping website practically which is very interesting. More interesting topic when you build the shopping website is the integration with the Paypal sandbox environment. Publishing and content management is one of the highlight for Liferay in addition to its portal features. This book explores all the content management features of Liferay which is useful for most business scenarios. Another strengh of Liferay is the built-in portlets that comes bundled with the product and thess discussion about those built-in portlets in this book. Enterprise Edition of Lifeay is bundled with more built-in portlets and this book discussed the Community edition of the Liferay for simplicity.
One of the best topic comes as the last chapter - Administration. It is crucial for anyone who works with the product to understand little bit about the server administration. Creating multiple sites, Virtual hosting, implementing staging environments, Configuring logs, Monitoring server and portal sessiona are key topcis being discussed.
Overall, this book is a good introduction to anyone who is new to Liferay. Download a sample chapter from this book here.
