Flex+AIR portal container for Liferay

The folks at Integrated Semantics have developed a Flex/AIR-based front-end for Liferay Portal. This is a great example of Liferay's flexibility when it comes to separating the presentation tier from the back-end services, standards implementations, APIs, and authentication / authorization capabilities. Gartner's portal decomposition ideas are at play here (portal server providing services to both portal and non-portal applications enterprise-wide), and we're also proud to see the strength of innovation going on in the Liferay community.

You can check out the details on the Flexible Liferay Google Code Repository, where they list some of the major features: 

• Can display regular Liferay portlets (JSR-168, JSR-286, HTML/Ajax etc.)
• All of Liferay backend, standards it supports can be leveraged
• Can display Flex portlets (swfs) without html wrapper (no need for special handling of restarting when resize portlet) from within a portlet war
• Leverage Liferay app catalog to also manage Flex portlets
• Leverage Liferay security / authentication (ldap, sso, etc.) to also manage Flex portlets
• Flex portlets can take advantage of AIR specific features (native desktop file drag / drop, native clipboard, local files, offline db)
• Use Flex and ActionScript to develop new UI, java / groovy / grails for backend

Implementation

• Uses BlazeDS to remote to some Java Apis added via Liferay Ext environment (used Liferay 5.2.3)
• Built on top of the flexible-dashboard google code project (uses esria dashboard / devnet sample, flexmdi tiling/cascade)

Implemented

• Sign in (Login dialog), Sign out
• My Places menu
• Display of tabs for pages in selected place
• Display of a HTML pod with Liferay widget for each portlet in selected page

[Abdullah Shaikh]

Hey it's cool to have Liferay from Flex/AIR