2013 Liferay Marketplace App Contest Results

Today Liferay announced the winners of the 2013 Liferay Marketplace App Contest, and I'm particularly happy to see so many great entries and apps in the contest! The contest entries covered a wide range of use cases and employed some pretty cool technology above and beyond Liferay itself, and is a testament to the flexibility and power of Liferay. But it's more than that. Seeing the passion from our community and the innovations in these apps underscores the fact that Liferay is a great platform, but the true power comes from the ideas and applications from you, our community of customers, partners, and enthusiasts.

As of today, there are about 100 community, non-Liferay apps on the Marketplace, with another 100 in the pipeline in various stages of approval. All of them bring new value and ideas to our community, and many of them are open source (including our two grand prize winners). These apps and their developers bring huge value to our community and to your Liferay deployments. Of those entries submitted, I personally found 10 or so apps I will be regularly using in my daily work from now on, and I can't wait to see what other gems you come up with in the months and years ahead.

Below are our winners and runners-up, along with some interesting facts about the app and/or the developers. You should check these apps out, and while you're at it, check out the rest of the really cool apps on the marketplace. It was really tough to choose the best of the best, because there were so many awesome entries! Great job, everyone!

Note that due to several issues in the previous Liferay release (6.1 CE GA2 and EE GA2), several of these apps would not work out of the box with GA2 without workarounds, so couldn't be on the Marketplace, but were still able to participate in the contest anyway (it wouldn't have been fair otherwise!). So some of the below apps do not have links, as they are still in the process of being vetted against the new release.

Valamis (grand prize winner)

Valamis is a social learning environment for sharing and receiving knowledge. You can use it as your organization's social learning environment. You can also use it to encourage individuals to collaboratively share tacit knowledge which cannot be found from books, but which is a combination of experience and wisdom.

Valamis was formerly known as Project Learn, one of our first Liferay Community projects! It's awesome to see this project graduate into a commercial open source tool. Also, they can make sweet videos! Janne and Jari have done a fantastic job and we're lucky to have them.

Props 'n' Prefs (grand prize winner)

This application allows to search and view system properties, portal properties, portal preferences and server preferences. It also allows you to delete portal preferences or server preferences, with full search of properties and their values, full content popups, one-click resetting of portal and server settings, and more!

Sébastien actually submitted around 5 or so apps to the contest. One prize per person! But pretty much every app is useful, and the scripting apps are in my go-to list now, but this one provides a huge help to admins everywhere that get stuck with some of Liferay's quirks when it comes to configuration, and integrates nicely with the platform.

Mercado

Mercado is a marketplace for software applications for an IT enterprise to create a user centric collaborative interface within a controlled environment. Create a knowledge repository of products, reports, videos, photos, code, and other downloadable items, with included workflow, dashboards, moderation, search, ratings, and other features.

Cignex Datamatics needs no introduction, and has been a long-time community and professional partner. If you're attending the Liferay North America Symposium this year, you'll have a chance to talk to them about this and other apps.

Remote jBPM Workflow

A drop-in workflow engine which features REST services exposed by a GWT-based console, and integration with JBPM 5.4. Other features include form management, programmatic access to form values, and more!

Liferay is a well-known integration platform, and this app gives a nice turn-key solution for your JBPM needs.

BTop

BTop is an online payment app which will help you optimize transactions and facilitate online payments services management. By using an easy administration board you will be able to manage payment plugins, sellers configuration, payment methods and get a report for each transaction. Other features include a customizable rules engine, secure payments, geolocalization of payments, and integration with Liferay's shopping portlet.

This is an app that is currently in the pipeline for the Marketplace, so not yet available, but will be very soon! 

Workflow Selection by Web Content Structure Type

This handy app allows you to assign different Liferay workflows based on the type (structure) of web content articles. Simple, yet powerful addition to your workflow arsenal. Why didn't I think of that! :)

Permeance is also a heavy contributor to our various community initiatives like the Bugsquad, Community Verifier, and most recently (and still in progress) the Liferay 6.2 Community Beta Program.

Webtown Web Content Display

This app is an enhanced web content display portlet. It allows you to filter the web content you want to display in several added ways, including by scope, structure, tags, and categories. It also lets you specify the listing and detailed view templates you want to use for each of the structures, and has additional extra features like paging, social bookmarks, ordering, and more.

PDF Viewer

An enhanced PDF viewer, supporting features such as browsing the document structure (chapters, subchapters), zoom, and searching within the PDF. It also integrates with LIferay's global search capabilities, and a friendly URL scheme for documents.

Alexey was also recognized as a Contributor of the Year last year.

OpenScape Web Collaboration

OpenScape embeds a real-time document sharing capability into your team collaboration space. With a simple click from your Liferay Portal, you can select contacts, friends, or team members that need to participate in a web collaboration session, and start up a collaborative session between participants.

The team at Siemens did a great job integrating their web collab product with LIferay. It's not just an IFrame!

Ajaxable search container paginator

This handy hook turns every use of Liferay's Search Container taglibs and APIs into an ajax-powered, no-page-refresh-needed pagination tool (this includes even Liferay's own use of the Search Container).

Omar did an awesome job recognizing a shortcoming of typical portals (and the portlet 2.0 spec), and provided a simple and elegant solution. It just works.

Liferay Instant Messaging System

Do you like to chat with your friends on your favorite social network? Have you been missing the same functionality in Liferay? Not anymore! Brand new Liferay Instant Messaging System brings you all you ever wanted packed in a single plugin.

Shout

A simple yet powerful app to exchange short messages on a Liferay site. Another really simple yet cool way to engage audiences on a Liferay site. It breaks down barriers to communication in a nice looking and performant way.

AjaxQuote Portlet

Real-time market quote data is streamed to one or more portlets on the page by Ajax and JavaScript technology. Watch the tickers move in real-time on the screen (with no stress on the back-end; all client side services). Supports anonymous and personalized tickers.

Popups

This app lets you write custom popups (using Liferay's WCM system), and target those popups using a flexible, rules-based interface. Target based on URL, site role (with autocomplete), and select the frequency for the popups.

BonitaBPM Integration

This app provides a complete integration with BonitaBPM. Manage BonitaBPM processes, cases and user tasks from Liferay Portal & Synchronize Bonita users with Liferay.

Jack Rider was also featured on Radio LIferay recently, and has also been an avid supporter of Liferay and our community. Thanks, Jack!

Custom Landing Page Hook

After a user logs into Liferay, it is a common requirement to be able to redirect them to a different page based on their Organization or Site membership. This hook allows you to specify the desired redirection behavior using a properties file setting.

Tejas was also recognized as a Top Contributor, and this app is one of the most often requested on our forums. Now I have a place to point people.

Categories Multi Select

This app provides a new search facet, integrated with Liferay's Faceted Search, allowing one to select multiple categories to "drill down" into, while searching for assets, as well as a handy portlet that can be used to filter existing asset publisher apps on a given page.

stickyNotes

stickyNotes allow you to have a dashboard to post sticky notes, and it can be located anywhere on the portal. With stickyNotes you can post ads, events, reminders, or anything you can think of, in a visual and simple way, using multiple layouts and colors.

Random Content Rotator

This portlet allows a random piece of web content (text, image, document, video, or any combination) to be randomly displayed on page load. This is great for rotating banner images, side bar text/images, quotes, or testimonials.

Ask IRC

A handy way to integrate your portal with Liferay's official IRC channel! With this app, administrators and users have an easy and foolproof way to contact other community members in the official Liferay chat channel on FreeNode (#liferay). About a month ago I started noticing new users like "LRAdminInNeed824" join the Liferay chat channel and begin asking intelligent questions. Now I know why they are showing up! Thanks Bijan!

...In closing

A big thanks goes to each of the 70+ people who participated in our first ever app contest. It's great to see so many of you willing to showcase your awesome talents and ideas! Liferay would not be where it is today without the contributions, innovations, enthusiasm from our community. I can't wait for the next one!

[Jelmer Kuperus]

According to this page Valamis was submitted to the app store October 16, 2012 (http://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/application/17200859?_7_WAR_osbportlet_backURL=&_7_WAR_osbportlet_appVersionId=27160808&_7_WAR_osbportlet_tabs1=history)

According to the contest rules (http://www.liferay.com/zh/marketplace/app-contest-2013/rules) "Apps already approved for distribution on the Liferay Marketplace as of December 31, 2012 are not eligible to win"

Can you explain how they still managed to win a price ?

[Janne Hietala]

Not to commenting on the rules, but Valamis was approved to Marketplace distribution on 6th of June 2013.

[Jelmer Kuperus]

So how come the "Date Added" label on your app mentions October 16, 2012 ? Is it a bug or did it really take 8 months to get the app approved ?

I thought the rule was silly to begin with (way to punish the early adopters) but because i'd seen the date on the app I was surprised to see it win.

Other than that Valamis seems like a comprehensive app and a worthy winner.

[Janne Hietala]

In our case, it took that time because it was mandatory to have PACL on until May or June 2013. Our app used originally ORBroker for persistence and we just could not get that working with PACL and we could not submit the app. What we did was rewrite whole application to use Service Builder, because that was pretty much the only way to get PACL working. That was a huge work and we finished the job at the beginning of June. Just then the mandatory PACL setting was lifted. Valamis works PACL on with Tomcat, but there's some issues with Glassfish and that's why it's turned off on version 1.4.5.

Thank you for the compliments.