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Why is it called Liferay ?

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Ching Ice-creaming, modificado hace 11 años.

Why is it called Liferay ?

Junior Member Mensajes: 28 Fecha de incorporación: 2/03/13 Mensajes recientes
Below is an old article of www.liferay.com written by Brian Chan around ten years ago. Maybe many young Liferay insiders and outsiders have not read it before.

I post it to encourage any portal developers that anyone can code , everyone can become a great artist and a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/quotes


Why is it called Liferay?

When I was in college, I attended a weekend interview for Sapient. They flew about 30 candidates to Chicago and impressed us with a lot of wine and cheese. The recruiters went on to tell us how great Sapient was and how they were all (paper) millionaires because they joined the company early on. All of us had heard the same story over and over again from Sapient, Scient, Viant, and all other 'ient consulting firms. We knew that these companies were already mature and that none of us would get to be paper millionaires because their stock prices were already so high. So a group of us, me included, decided we wanted to start our own company. We would definitely be in on the "in" if we were the founders. We brainstormed all night and decided to start a company that would revolutionize the medical industry. So we close the name LIFEray, the opposite of a DEATHray. We had all these great ideas, but we had no money or credentials. Nothing came of it.

Overall, I liked Viant the most. I enjoyed the people I met and they all seemed to be smart folks. On the other hand, Bob Howe, the CEO of Scient, was absolutely legendary. He had a brain, some guts, and a lot of charm. I seesawed between Scient and Viant, but in the end, I went with... Groundswell. I chose Groundswell because it was a Viant clone but was still in its infancy and didn't have a lot of other college kids. Groundswell seemed to the perfect place to work at after college.

I bounced around from project to project and realized that professional consulting meant turning in work that would get a C- at a community college. My projects led me to consult for several large companies and what I learned horrified me. My Java technical lead didn't know the difference between an int and an integer, and couldn't understand the concept of packages and directories. Forget design patterns or clean code, everything was one large blob of tangled spaghetti. It was so horrifying that it has forever pushed me toward writing clean code.

A few months passed and the dot com bubble burst. Companies stopped spending money and consulting firms started laying people off by the thousands. Groundswell decided to reposition itself apart from the 'ients by focusing on portal integration. We worked with Plumtree, Epicentric, SharePoint, Viador, and a host of other portal products. We were all told how portals were useful and could save companies millions of dollars while improving employee productivity.

At about the same time, I was asked by my pastor to build a web site for the church. I browsed a lot of different church web sites and they were all brochure ware. I asked myself, "What if my church had a portal?" Perhaps churches could benefit as well. I thought of using one of the commerical portals for my church, but the costs were too high (100k for Plumtree). I started looking at cheaper alternatives but didn't find anything flexible, useful, and well designed. I even looked at the source code to Viador (Groundswell bought a license) and was horrified to see another jumbo mess of spaghetti.

I lifted up the situation to the Lord and he heard me. He empowered me then to write a portal and empowers me now to continue... but let me give some more background information on myself.

I had a partner in college named Kevin. We had an OS class together and were given an assignment to build a UNX clone called Yalnix. All together, the OS took about three thousand lines of code. My partner wrote about three thousand lines, and I wrote about fifty. The professor even called my partner to ask if I did anything. Kevin was kind enough to say that I had done "enough." It's not that I didn't try! I spent just as many hours as he did, but I just didn't understand anything! I couldn't grasp pointers, arrays, objects, primitives, hash tables... anything. This went on throughout my entire experience as a CS major at the University of Chicago. I don't know how I managed to graduate. One night, I stared at the same AI problem over and over again... I always aimed to at least put something down on paper for at least half of the questions on the problem set. I was to clueless I could only do the first problem. I was just too tired and dumb.

I started to cry and said that I would quit because I couldn't take it anymore. I prayed, "Father, if you help me pass, I'll devote this CS degree to glorifying you. I know you already own everything I have, so that's besides the point, but take it and use it to magnify yourself." I took a ten minute nap and my friend Brian Kim knocked on my door. He had the answers from the TA and he kindly taught me how to solve the problem. I finished half the questions on the problem set and went to sleep. I graduated a year later with a degree in CS and a degree in Economics from one of the top 10 universities in the country. The irony is that the only thing I learned from school was how to cry. I ended up with a 2.7 GPA.

I said earlier that God is my strength. He is. He has shown to me that he is powerful by taking someone who could barely code fifty lines and turning him into someone who can lead a major J2EE open source project with several hundred thousand lines of code.

This is my testimony, and I testify that Jesus is real, powerful, and loving... his LIFE.
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Why is it called Liferay ?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
My Java technical lead didn't know the difference between an int and an integer,


Just to be a little bit picky. Java is case sensitive. Should correct that to "int" and "Integer". emoticon

Nice story. Have to update wikipedia to include how the name was derived.

Brian should also remember to thank his friends who decided to start up a company with him. He can thank God for leading him to them, but not everyone is willing to risk on a new startup. He can also thank God for leading him to US. If Brian was in Japan, nobody would have wanted to join him in a startup, and he would have a very difficult time getting any customers too.

Anyone can code, but it's much more difficult to be able to make a living on that code. One can thank God for giving opportunity, but one also have to remember to thank fellow people for making thing really happen.

BTW, as you may have noticed, I'm probably the only Japanese active here and for that matter in any open source forums. I think Liferay.com already knows how difficult it is in Japan from looking at results from their partner here and from their office here. I can even add that Alfresco Japan, who is holding almost a monthly event and sending periodic news letter as well as president of the Japanese company visiting several companies each day, is probably not faring any better (I think). Have to be VERY proactive and have many acquaintances who are willing to help to make any progress here.

Check page 12 on the following page on how Japanese market works. Companies only sub-contracts with companies they already know who unfortunately already have their own set of software they use. It's necessary to change this system first. I'm not really trying to "sell" liferay but more of change the Japanese society. emoticon
http://www.slideshare.net/hiranabe/agile-in-india-and-japan-nonakas-scrum

Finally, I do want to thank everybody including employees of Liferay.com for helping me to get here. emoticon
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James Falkner, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Why is it called Liferay ?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 1399 Fecha de incorporación: 17/09/10 Mensajes recientes
Hitoshi Ozawa:

Nice story. Have to update wikipedia to include how the name was derived.


Good luck with that emoticon I've made a few wikipedia edits the last couple of years about products at Liferay and at my previous employer, all of which were rolled back with no reason given. Perhaps you'll have better luck!
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Why is it called Liferay ?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
No problem. My pages and edits stays intact. Kind of difficult to rollback me back here in Japan. emoticon