Book excerpt: Summary Liferay in Action is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to building portals on the Liferay 6 platform. Fully supported and authorized by Liferay, this book guides you smoothly from your first exposure to Liferay through the crucial day-to-day tasks of building and maintaining an enterprise portal that works well within your existing IT infrastructure. About the Technology A portal is a website built around a collection of components that request, display, and share information. Liferay Portal 6, an enterprise-ready development platform, makes it a snap to build portals that integrate with your existing backend systems and provide a rich interactive user experience. Because Liferay uses standard Java and JavaScript, along with built-in SOAP and JSON support for web services, developers can be productive immediately. And since it's available in both a free, open source version as well as a fully-supported commercial edition, it's an affordable solution for almost any business or organization About the Book Liferay in Action is the official guide to building Liferay portal applications using Java and JavaScript. If you've never used Liferay before, don't worry. This book starts with the basics: setting up your development environment and creating a working portal. Then, it builds on that foundation to help you discover social features, tagging, ratings, and more. You'll also explore the Portlet 2.0 API, and learn to create custom themes and reusable templates. Experienced developers will learn how to use new Liferay APIs to build social and collaborative sites, use the message bus and workflow, implement indexing and search, and more. This book was developed in close collaboration with Liferay engineers, so it answers the right questions, and answers them in depth. No experience with Liferay or the Portlets API is required, but basic knowledge of Java and web technology is assumed. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Complete coverage of Liferay Portal 6 Covers both the commercial and open source versions Custom portlet development using the Portlet 2.0 spec Liferay's social network API Add functionality with hooks and Ext plugins ====================================== Table of Contents PART 1 WORKING WITH LIFERAY AND PORTLETS The Liferay difference Getting started with the Liferay development platform PART 2 WRITING APPLICATIONS ON LIFERAY'S PLATFORM A data-driven portlet made easy MVC the Liferay way Designing your site with themes and layout templates Making your site social Enabling user collaboration PART 3 CUSTOMIZING LIFERAY Hooks Extending Liferay effectively A tour of Liferay APIs