Why You Should Consider Liferay for Your Next Web Application

Did you know that Gartner has recognized Liferay as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for the seventh year in a row? Liferay portal, available as open source, is popular amongst companies across different verticals as their preferred enterprise portal platform. With our recent partnership with Liferay, we aim to bring our customers the best of Liferay services.

Based on our experience of working with several companies worldwide with their product development using Liferay, here is our take on what Liferay makes a good technology investment.

Top Reasons Why Companies Prefer Using Liferay

Liferay is an open source enterprise portal which is free and mainly used to enable corporate extranet and intranet. It is a robust web application platform written in Java and offers a host of features useful for the development of portals and websites. With its built-in web content management system, it allows users to create websites and portals with the integration of themes, portlets (pluggable UI software components) and pages.

Liferay boasts of over 4M lifetime downloads and enjoys an extremely vibrant community of over 45,000 members.

Here are some of the advantages that Liferay offers:

Single point of access for all digital business communication

Liferay helps companies build comprehensive, fast, and reliable digital experiences for their customers. Through these digital experiences, customers can stay in touch with the businesses, share their views, and get answers to their questions. Businesses can quickly build websites and mobile apps by leveraging the readymade out-of-the-box features of Liferay – they also have options to customize the content and functionality for specific segments and make the content available on mobile devices.

Ready to use with easy customization

Liferay portal is designed as a fully developed portal which covers most of the web application needs with customization options available to suit specific business requirements. Developers can simply download it and get started instantly. It offers over 80 readymade portlet applications which can be used to create dynamic websites. Its lightweight nature makes configuration and implementation easier.

With the plugin mechanism, developers can customize and add new features to their portals according to the business needs. For any additional new functionality, tools can be added using just a few clicks.

Ease of Use

Liferay offers an extremely intuitive and easy to use interface. Changing the look and feel, theme, or the page layouts is a matter of few clicks. The repositioning of tools and elements of the portal can be easily done through simple drag-and-drop. With its wide-ranging collection of out-of-the-box tools, businesses can start building effective business solutions almost immediately.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

The Community Edition of Liferay Portal is available as an open source license and the business-friendly commercial license is available with Liferay Portal Enterprise Subscription. Liferay does not bind businesses to a particular technology stack. It comes with 60 tools, over 20 themes, and several more developer tools at no additional costs. The built-in features help companies address most of their common needs including web publishing, collaboration, social networking, administration, etc. Organizations hugely benefit from such low total cost of ownership.

Security

One of the biggest advantages of Liferay is the security it offers making it a preferred choice for not only small and medium-sized enterprises but also global financial and insurance companies, government agencies, and also the Department of Defense. It uses industry standard, government-grade encryption technologies. Liferay follows the OWASP Top 10 and CWE/SANS Top 25 lists to ensure the security of the portal and offer protection against attacks and security vulnerabilities. As confirmed by Liferay, “it provides in-built protection against CSRF attacks, Local File Inclusion, Open Redirects, Uploading and serving files of dangerous types, Content Sniffing, Clickjacking, Path Traversal, and many other common attacks.”

Hook and Plugin Extensions

With Liferay, it is possible for businesses to customize the product behavior to suit the business needs without the need for rewriting the code from scratch. The hook plugins are easy to use and lead to lesser maintenance and upgrade issues. Hooks may be used in place of extension plugins for performing custom actions on user login or portal start up or for modifying the properties of the portal.

Modularity

Businesses have an option to detach each functionality or module built using Liferay from the core installation. This ensures that instead of building a single large application, businesses can now build small modules and ensure that the overall application performance is not hampered because of the overheads. With such modularity, the installations become more manageable, deployments are faster, and maintenance is easier.

Developer-Friendly

With features like easy integrations, support for major infrastructure solutions, compliance with major industry standards, and support for tools written in other languages, Liferay is extremely popular amongst the developer community as well.

At InfoBeans, we recently helped one of the leading law firms in New York create an interactive digital platform using Liferay – this platform monitors and delivers relevant, high priority intelligence to their customers.

Connect with us if you would like to know how you can leverage the power of Liferay within your enterprise or for your next product development.