Liferay West Coast Symposium 2011 Agenda

The agenda is filled with thought-provoking, eye-opening sessions that showcase interesting ways companies have used the Liferay Platform to meet their business needs. These sessions include illuminating stories, useful lessons learned, and noteworthy insights.

Please note that the contents of the agenda below is not final and will be updated periodically. However, for your convenience, the start and end times will not change. Please arrange your itinerary so that you are able to stay for the entire Symposium program.

Day 1 Day 2
Time General Sessions
7:45a-10:30a

Registration/Check-In and Breakfast

8:30a

Welcome & Announcements
(James Falkner, Liferay)

8:45a

Keynote - Liferay 6.1 and Introducing Marketplace(Liferay Leadership Team)Download

10:25a

What's Coming in Web Content Management(Ray Augé, Liferay)Download

time Track A Track B Workshop 1 Workshop 2

11:15a

Accelerate and Simplify Development with Liferay IDE(Rich Sezov, Liferay)Download

Liferay as a Platform: A Case Study from Daiichi Sankyo & CIGNEX(Deep Bhatia, Daiichi Sankyo and Mitesh Panchal, CIGNEX)Download

 

AlloyUI and Liferay Themes: Q&A with Liferay Director of UI Engineering
(Nate Cavanaugh, Liferay)

 

 

11:55a

Lunch / Partner Pavilion / Solutions Showcases

time Track A Track B Workshop 1 Workshop 2
1:50p

Web Services Supercharged: Consuming Web Services the Right Way(Brett Swaim, Liferay)Download

Sensus Uses Liferay to Strengthen Their Global Web Presence(Alaaeldin El-Nattar, Rivet Logic and Danny Ayers, Sensus)Download

Marketplace Q&A
(James Falkner, Liferay)Download

 

2:40p

Performance Tuning(Nathan Shaw, Liferay)Download

Reduce IT Overhead and Streamline Business Processes with Liferay Data Lists and Workflow Forms(Michael Han, Liferay)Download

Backend Integrations (James Min, Liferay)Download

Extremely Flexible and Light Portal Customization(Ray Augé, Liferay)

3:30p

Phased Deployments Leveraging a Portal Architecture(Olaf Kock, Liferay)Download

 

Enterprise Liferay at Union Pacific Railroad
(Brian Bohnet and Tommy Doerr, Union Pacific Railroad)Download
 

4:20p

Games, Intranets and Harnessing Employee Creativity(Josh Asbury, Liferay)Download

Using Liferay as a Platform for Social Applications(Rich Sezov, Liferay and Manish Dixit, SocialEkwity, Inc.)Download

Using the Spring Portlet MVC Framework with Liferay(Barrie Selack, Liferay)

 

 

5:10p

5 Hidden Gems of AlloyUI to Leverage in Your Application(Nate Cavanaugh, Liferay)Download

Liferay Customer Case Study: Healthcare Industry

6:00p

Too Resilient to Fail: Open Source and the Network Economy(Bryan Cheung, Liferay)Download

6:45p-8:15p

Liferay/XTIVIA Networking Reception

8p-9:30p

The CIGNEX Datamatics After Party
(by invitation only)

Time General Sessions
8:00a

Building a Social Platform: OpenSocial and Liferay(Dennis Ju, Liferay)Download

8:50a

The History of Open Source(Dana Blankenhorn, Open Source Journalist, Freelancer)Download

9:40a

Product Roadmap: Liferay 6.2(Ed Chung, Liferay)Download

Time Track A Track B Workshop 1 Workshop 2
10:30a

Non-Traditional Data Stores (NoSQL)(Ray Augé, Liferay)Download

Honda Manufacturing of Alabama's Migration from WebSphere Portal to Liferay(Hugh Martin, Honda Manufacturing of Alabama)Download

Liferay MVCPortlet: Beyond the Basics
(Jeff Handa, Liferay)Download

 

Backend Integrations(James Min, Liferay)Download

 

11:20a

Industry Insights from the Trenches: Why Liferay Makes Sense in a Hyperactive Digital World(Chris Stavros, LEVEL Studios)Download

 

Put the Pulse of Your Business, in the Palm of Your Hand(David Becerra, MeLLmo)Download

12:00p

Lunch / Partner Pavilion / Solutions Showcases

1:50p

Creating an Enterprise User Experience Platform Using Liferay Portal(Vishveshwara Vasa, Deloitte Consulting LLP)Download

Personalized Customer Portal Case Study with XTIVIA(Derek Nerenberg, XTIVIA)Download

Using the Spring Portlet MVC Framework with Liferay(Barrie Selack, Liferay)

 

Migration from 5.2 to 6.1
(Brett Swaim and Minhchau Dang, Liferay)Download

 

2:40p

Understanding Liferay Evolution(James Falkner, Liferay)Download

Potential Paths to Using Liferay in the Cloud(Harpreet Singh, CloudBees)Download

3:30p

Liferay's Open Source Community: Past, Present, and Future(James Falkner, Liferay and Jamie Sammons, CDS Global)Download

Simplify Your Document Library: Introducing the NEW Liferay Sync(Gail Hernandez, Liferay)Download

 

 

4:20p - 5:00p

Closing Keynote
(Bryan Cheung, Liferay)

General Sessions

Building a Social Business Platform: OpenSocial and Liferay
(Dennis Ju, Liferay)
OpenSocial defines a common API for building web-based social applications using gadgets. This session will explore how Liferay is integrating the portal with the OpenSocial platform to allow gadgets to reside as first-class citizens alongside with portlets. The session will discuss strategies for leveraging this social platform and showcase new features for Liferay 6.1.

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Introducing Marketplace
(James Falkner, Liferay)
Liferay has built a strong and valuable platform with the services and capabilities you need -- portals, content management, collaboration, workflow, social networking, and a compelling user experience framework.  The Liferay Marketplace is the premier destination for complementary solutions built on the Liferay Platform, enabling Liferay customers, partners, ISVs, and the wider community to easily publish, share, and monetize these applications.  In this presentation, you will learn:

- How the Marketplace works
- How to use the Marketplace to find what you need
- How to develop for and publish to the Marketplace
- Marketplace Business and Technical guides


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Product Roadmap: Liferay 6.2
(Ed Chung, Liferay)
With Liferay Engineering deeply in the implementation cycles of Liferay Portal 6.1, Liferay Product Management gives a preview of what to look forward to in 2012 and beyond.  We will take a sneak peek at what Liferay is planning for the next evolution of its flagship product. Join us as we examine why Liferay Portal will remain your platform of choice into 2012 and beyond.

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The History of Open Source
(Dana Blankenhorn, Open Source Journalist, Freelancer)
Open source is as American as pumpkin pie. It is shared infrastructure. It is how we advance when no one actor can build what must be built. In this slide presentation, Dana Blankenhorn introduces you to the people, and concepts, that make open source what it is, from cavemen to the Cloud.

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Too Resilient to Fail: Open Source and the Network Economy
(Bryan Cheung, Liferay)
In the wake of great economic turbulence over the last few years, commercial open source software has more than ever proved its value to companies seeking new ways of creating value for its customers, employees, and partners. But open source is simply an expression of greater socio-cultural trends that are transforming the way we do business. What are the different economic models available to us in the 21st century as we consider the lessons learned from our recent crises? Join Bryan as he shares his thoughts on the bigger picture around why our platform vision is about much more than just the Liferay eco-system.

 

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Track A

Accelerate and Simplify Development with Liferay IDE
(Rich Sezov, Liferay)
Demos will include code and deploy to Liferay running on PaaS provider, building services with advanced Liferay Service Builder editor, and simplified Alloy taglib and Theme development.

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Games, Intranets and Harnessing Employee Creativity
(Josh Asbury, Liferay)

Games are infused in our culture and can facilitate greater technological interaction between people. Applications like Foursquare and Gowalla inspire people to compete, engage and connect in ways that are surprising to those who don't take part.  Traditional games like golf, football and basketball encourage people to not only take part in the sports, themselves, but to begin their own fantasy competitions.  
 

What prompts this enthusiasm and engagement?  How can this energy be harnessed in corporate intranets?  This presentation will discuss some ideas on how incorporating games into an intranet site could be the magic bullet for increasing employee productivity and engagement.

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Liferay's Open Source Community: Past, Present, and Future
(James Falkner, Liferay and Jamie Sammons, CDS Global)
Liferay can be traced back in time to its humble beginnings as a small open-source startup project.   Much of the technology found in today's Liferay also has its roots in this open community.  Many customers and users of Liferay benefit from participating in and contributing to its community, but many more stay on the sidelines and wonder how open source can benefit them or their business.   In this session, join James Falkner, Liferay's Community Manager, and Jamie Sammons, Portal Architect at CDS Global, as they explore the Liferay community, discussing the recent past, current successes, and future improvements that are helping to shape the Liferay Platform.  

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Non Traditional Data Stores (NoSQL)
(Ray Augé, Liferay)
There are a variety of reasons why we might consider implementing solutions using alternatives to relational data stores (what is being popularly labeled NoSQL). Users of Liferay are no different and wonder what possibilities are available to them. This session will discuss some of the types of data stores and how and where they might come into play with Liferay. We'll also demonstrate a complete implementation of using such a data store (MongoDB) as the backend for an existing Liferay service in order to provide extreme scalability.

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Performance Tuning
(Nathan Shaw, Liferay)
Your enterprise application may take a Liferay Portal instance into regions where the default portal configuration needs to be refined in order to meet your performance goals. We'll start by talking briefly about performance management, how to think about your performance strategy, and list tools you'll want to have in your toolkit.  Next we'll look at application level tuning including filter settings, database deployment, and search options.  Finally we'll look at caching strategies and various runtime settings.

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What's Coming in Web Content Management
(Ray Augé, Liferay)
The evolution of Liferay WCM continues. As Liferay forges ahead and breaks new ground with changes ranging from the most modest usability improvements all the way to innovations like web based VCS-like Branching and Versioning (Version Control System), the goal of delivering unprecedented content management capabilities to the masses is being realized. This session will discuss WCM features in the latest version of Liferay Portal and cover the roadmap for ongoing WCM development for the next and future versions. 

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Creating an Enterprise User Experience Platform Using Liferay Portal
(Vishveshwara Vasa, Deloitte Consulting LLP)
Every enterprise is working hard to have better user experience in this new online digital market place. User experience became one key part for both internal and external users. Companies are struggling to achieve one unified online experience with so many web technologies in the market today. This session will outline how to create a unified user experience platform using Liferay, reduce overall costs, and speed up the new application development. This session will provide information about Liferay integration with existing applications like SSO, Web Services, Security, Web Analytics, Content Management, Legacy Applications, and Search. This session will give you detailed knowledge on how to implement a user experience platform for an Enterprise and share with you the lessons learned during this process.

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Industry Insights from the Trenches: Why Liferay Makes Sense in a Hyperactive Digital World
(Chris Stavros, LEVEL Studios)
Join LEVEL Technology Strategist Chris Stavros as he shares insights on the state of enterprise portal frameworks in the marketplace, as well as how and why LEVEL leverages Liferay today. Chris will share leading examples of Liferay in action for clients like Cisco and CA Technologies, plus give a behind the scenes look at Liferay-to-native mobile app integration. LEVEL Studios is an interactive digital agency and Liferay Certified Gold Partner whose work influences some of the world's most influential brands, including Apple, Cisco, Netflix, RIM, VIZIO, and Quiksilver.

 

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Phased Deployments Leveraging a Portal Architecture
(Olaf Kock, Liferay)
For your software you want a good architecture, maintainability, functionality and time to market. I'm frequently seeing this intent leading to a "Big Design Upfront" (dropping the "time to market" requirement). However, when your application is running in a portal, you can leverage the portal architecture to help achieving all of the objectives: Compose your application from small fragments, introducing new functionality when it's ready. In this presentation I'm going to demo some approaches that help understanding this approach:

  • Several small sample portlets that extend an existing application: i.e. "utilizing inter-portlet communication", "helping business users to create structured web content"
  • Going beyond Look & Feel with themes: Adding Application specific functionality to the theme (beyond just embedding portlets)

You'll understand that simple interfaces between components can enable you to quickly react to user requirements and how to break down complex applications in favour of composing an application from small pieces. In the conclusion I'll also talk about where this approach makes sense and where it doesn't.

 

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Web Services Supercharged: Consuming Web Services the Right Way
(Brett Swaim, Liferay)
Learn how to connect to web service producers in a performant and easily managed way. This talk will cover how to create a centralized web service consumer, caching, and best practices to ensure that your external data sources don't slow down your user experience!

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Understanding Liferay Evolution
(James Falkner, Liferay)
Liferay has been adopted by thousands of websites worldwide, using its robust features and performance, and taking advantage of services you cannot find in any other portal platform. Developers and companies invest time and resources into building on top of Liferay, and rely on its stability as a foundational platform to deliver needed services and functionality. In this presentation, learn how Liferay manages changes to its platform, what to expect in future releases, and see how Liferay's underlying architecture and software engineering practices translate into a dependable, yet innovative platform for your business.

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Track B

Five Hidden Gems of AlloyUI That You Can Leverage in Your Applications Today
(Nathan Cavanaugh, Liferay)
In this session, attendees will learn about using the AlloyUI taglibs such as <aui:input/>, <aui:script/>, <aui:layout/>, sugar helpers (javascript methods, extensions etc) to help make working with elements easier to manipulate, and utilizing Liferay CSS framework to perform common tasks. Attendees will also discover how to leverage AlloyUI components from web content articles as well as handling frequently used patterns.

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Reduce IT Overhead and Streamline Business Processes with Liferay Data Lists and Workflow Forms
(Michael Han and Ed Chung, Liferay)
As an IT manager, you have to balance immediate needs of your business with the strategic initiatives necessary for supporting long term growth. Often times, strategic initiatives, like the introduction of an ERP system, become side tracked in favor of short term solutions like creating a web application for field sales representatives to capture orders. To help alleviate these pain points, Liferay introduces the User Data List feature to help business users create applications to gather and display business data. Using User Data Lists, your business users can easily create these applications within Liferay Portal in a controlled manner, without compromising overall system integrity, security, and scalability. We will also preview how Liferay's Kaleo Workflow can augment the capabilities of User Data Lists.

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Put the Pulse of Your Business in the Palm of Your Hand
(David Becerra, MeLLmo)
We're putting an end to limited, lifeless business reporting that's either tied to your laptop or a struggle to read on your mobile device. Roambi is an innovative mobile application that quickly transforms your Liferay business reports and data into secure, interactive mobile analytics – instantly delivered to any iPhone or iPad. It lets on-the-go professionals easily view, interact with and share up-to-the-minute company information – and provides them with insight for analysis, impromptu presentations and smart decision-making. Join us to find out more about how Roambi works with your Liferay reports and what it can do for you and your company. Our presenter will show Roambi's ease of use by uploading an Excel file or connecting to a BI platform. Then will show Roambi in action on an iPhone and iPad simulator.

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Using Liferay as a Platform for Social Applications
(Rich Sezov, Liferay and Manish Dixit, SocialEkwity, Inc.)
Liferay is a great application aggregator, a fantastic collaboration tool, and an incredibly useful content management system. But did you know it also excels as a platform for social applications? Join us as we explore Liferay's Social API and see how Social Umami, a destination that lets users search for, buy, and share all the things that define their unique style, implemented it for their user community.

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Liferay as a Platform: A Case Study from Daiichi Sankyo & CIGNEX
(Deep Bhatia, Daiichi Sankyo and Mitesh Panchal, CIGNEX)
Learn about our journey and adoption of Liferay Portal as a Platform at Daiichi Sankyo. The main application was the Intranet - starting off with Pilot to a full-blown implementation, to a fully personalized Intranet! Along this journey, we also implemented several Extranet Portals, a Collaboration Portal (based on Liferay Social Office), and several CMS micro-sites. Also, learn about our integrations with Documentum, SAP, and other legacy CFM applications. Today, we are sitting pretty on a rich library of portlets that may be reused across projects thereby enabling us to respond to business requirements better, faster, and cheaper!


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Personalized Customer Portal Case Study with XTIVIA
(Derek Nerenberg, XTIVIA)
How can you deliver content to users based on their individual profile attributes in Liferay? Delivering the right content to the right users at the right time can be an arduous task. Can you imagine how powerful your platform would be if you could deliver content to users based on their demographic profiles? Email blasts, news alerts, and special announcements can help you unleash the power of your business and give you the upper hand. In this case study, you will learn how Derek and his team approached and developed a robust content personalization engine and integrated it with Liferay to satisfy highly complex content delivery scenarios.


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Honda Manufacturing of Alabama's Migration from WebSphere Portal to Liferay
(Hugh Martin, Honda Manufacturing of Alabama)
Hugh will show why and how the project team recommended to Honda that they move their intranet from WebSphere Portal to Liferay. He will provide some background regarding the project, the challenges they faced with WebSphere Portal, how they selected Liferay as a potential solution to those challenges, as well as the results of the migration. He will also provide some details regarding their "low-tech" solution for integrating IBM's LTPA single sign-on solution into their Liferay implementation. Finally, Hugh will explain how the Liferay product itself is only half of the success story.


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Liferay Customer Case Study: Healthcare Industry
A healthcare customer has chosen to replace its legacy intranet portal with Liferay. We will describe the journey which was used to select the new technology and the steps which are being taken to migrate from the legacy portal.


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Potential Paths to Using Liferay in the Cloud
(Harpreet Singh, CloudBees)
Cloud promises to free developers and IT both and bring in tremendous productivity gains. This talk introduces the cloud landscape, specifically areas like laaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We highlight possible paths to the cloud for Liferay developers and deployers. We start with talking about how to use cloud for development - focusing on moving code to the cloud and building in the cloud - an area that would be appealing to plugin developers. We will wrap the discussion by talking about how deployers can take their Liferay installation to the cloud.


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Sensus Uses Liferay to Strengthen their Global Web Presence
(Alaaeldin El-Nattar, Rivet Logic and Danny Ayers, Sensus)
Sensus, a global leader in utility infrastructure and resource conservation, strengthens its presence worldwide by enhancing its ability to manage the messaging around their proven products and solutions at a global scale using a single cost effective tool. Liferay 6's latest features help Sensus be more competitive by allowing them to represent their offerings in an extremely intuitive way while maintaining product hierarchy and without sacrificing flexibility. With the ability to share divisions, product lines, product, and solutions across regions when needed, Sensus now has a solution at their disposal that will help them grow their business worldwide and provide the needed messaging intuitively and in a way that will scale into the future.


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Simplify Your Document Library: Introducing the NEW Liferay Sync
(Gail Hernandez, Liferay)
With electronic files, everyone can seamlessly work on the same file together. The downside is keeping track of all the changes and the different versions. Did you remember to copy it to your memory stick before the meeting? Is it the latest version? The old Document Library, though not as convenient as could be, managed to help resolve all these issues by being your single repository for all your files. In this session, you will learn how the new Liferay Sync will make your life easier. Changes from your desktop are automatically changed in the updated Document Library. We will go over the new user interface, installation, configuration, and the future of Sync to get you started on your way to higher productivity!


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Workshops

Liferay Workshop: Backend Integrations
(James Min, Liferay)
Do you want to know how to integrate Liferay with another system? How do you go about it? What are the best practices and gotchas? For this session, we will dive deep into the code and use the Liferay Plugins SDK to show how to do it from the backend. You'll get your feet wet and start to familiarize yourself with Liferay's framework. Kickstart your Liferay development ASAP! This session will cover:

  • Liferay Plugins SDK: When do you use which types of Liferay plugins?
  • To extend existing Liferay behavior/features/classes, or create something brand new?
  • Developing against third-party interfaces, web services, and other APIs
  • Creating and deploying these Liferay plugins 
  • Examples of other backend integrations
  • General Liferay best practices
For this hands-on session, knowledge of server-side Java, Spring Framework, and Struts is not absolutely required, but will be very helpful. Other requirements:

1) A working Liferay Developer Studio should be pre-installed on your computer (http://www.liferay.com/get-ee-trial/downloads/developer-studio) + trial license installed (included in the email that is sent to you after download)
2) Attendees should have some knowledge of Liferay plug-in development is helpful

Files specific to the workshop will be available via a USB drive or wireless.

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Liferay Workshop: Extremely Flexible and Light Portal Customization
(Ray Augé and Greg Amerson, Liferay)
This workshop will demonstrate advanced theme features to make integral UI customizations; such as freemarker, taglibs, and AlloyUI. Workshop leaders will also demonstrate UI development using Liferay IDE.

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Liferay Workshop: Using the Spring Portlet MVC Framework with Liferay
(Barrie Selack, Liferay)
This workshop is designed to get you started using Spring Portlet MVC in your custom portlets.

You'll learn how to:

  • Configure your portlet with both XML configuration files and annotations
  • Use either JSP or FreeMarker (or both) for your views
  • Use taglibs in FreeMarker, including Liferay's taglibs
  • Internationalize entire pages (for large sections of formatted text)
  • Serve static and dynamic resources (like images created on the fly)
  • Configure user friendly error pages for your controller exceptions
  • Get FreeMarker template error messages to the screen

Feel free to attend the workshop without the hands-on requirements if you'd just like to see the presentation and learn about Spring MVC Portlets.

If you'd like to do some hands on, the workshop assumes the following:
  • a working IDE (Eclipse, Intellij, etc.) installed on your computer
  • a Liferay 6.0 bundle with Tomcat downloaded. You can download it here.
  • Some knowledge of Liferay plug-in development Files for the project we will be working with, will be available via a USB drive or wireless.


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Liferay MVCPortlet, Beyond the Basics
(Jeff Handa, Liferay)
Many new portlet developers get started by diving into a heavy weight framework for developing all of their portlets. For developers that are already learning 1 new technology (JSR 286 based portlets), this introduces another steep learning curve. Before you get bogged down in buzz words and the framework of the day, spend some time getting to know the Liferay MVCPortlet and learn how you can use it solve many of the same problems these heavyweight frameworks are designed to solve. Learn why it makes sense to leverage it for your portlets, and how you can use some of the more advanced features to maintain clean code, even on very complex portlet applications. 

This workshop would be geared toward portlet developers of all levels that are interested in learning more about the Liferay MVCPortlet framework. I'd need some help from an experienced consultant who has implemented a very complex portlet application using the framework and can provide some comparison over how this might have been done with one of the more popular frameworks (JSF or Spring MVC Portlet).

Other requirements:


1) A working Liferay Developer Studio should be pre-installed on your computer (http://www.liferay.com/get-ee-trial/downloads/developer-studio) + trial license installed (included in the email that is sent to you after download)
2) Attendees should have some knowledge of Liferay plug-in development is helpful

Files specific to the workshop will be available via a USB drive or wireless.

 



Marketplace Q&A
(James Falkner, Liferay)
The upcoming Liferay Marketplace is an exciting new hub for sharing, browsing and downloading Liferay-compatible applications. Join James Falkner, Liferay Community Manager, and get answers to questions you have regarding this exciting new feature in the Liferay Community. Learn how to connect to other Marketplace users in the community, find and use apps, and create your own!

(Note: this is not a hands-on workshop)

 

 

Questions?

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If you have questions about the Liferay West Coast Symposium or need help registering, please email our Events team

Join the conversation on Twitter using the #LRWCS2011 and #LRunconference hashtags.