Alternative to Liferay/JSR 168 and 286 Portals?

Question

My team has been writing a dashboard application using Node.js, Twitter Boostrap, Mongo DB, and Mule for an ESB.

Recently an executive asked us to change our approach to a Portal/Portlet container like Liferay.

Some of us on the team have experience with Liferay, and we have pretty negative feelings about it. Dealing with things like full-page refreshes, portlet lifecycles, style and theming issues, and limited DBMS coverage are at the top of our list of complaints.

We see where our executive team is coming from. They have decided that they want to make the dashboard extensible and easy or easier to plug into for other groups.

Is there a solution out there which can balance the modern web expectations of users with the enterprise needs of IT professionals and executives concerned with building and extensible application with something like Liferay? Pluggable widgets are important here.

Node would obviously be our preference with something like Grails as a close second.

Thanks,

Answer 1

This question may not exactly be a good fit for StackOverflow's format, but I can offer some thoughts still.

If you want to stick your current platform, you need to figure exactly what features your executives want to get out of moving to a new platform. Are those features something you can build into your current platform? How much effort will that take compared to rewriting everything else? How effort will it take to learn a new skillset across your whole team? I'm sure your team can learn the new skills effectively but that still takes effort and there will be growing pains as your teams learns. If you can show to your executives that you can get the same features for a similar or less effort and that you can still have similar total cost of ownership, you can make a case to stay on your current platform.

Also I think you are underestimating what a Portlet container can do. I work mostly with WebSphere Portal so maybe thats why I think most of the pain points you mentioned really aren't that difficult to manage for me. Just because your container needs a particular DBMS to manage itself does not mean you can't use a separate DB for your custom data needs. JSR-286 introduced serveResource as a way to make AJAX easier to implement in portlets. In WebSphere Portal (don't know about Liferay), changing out the whole page content without a page reload might the most difficult on your list I'll admit though.

Modern doesn't have to mean bleeding-edge tech. And the large software products can still perform if you know how to use them right, just like any other tool.