Can GateIn, the new JBoss Portal/eXo Portal combination, outshine Liferay?

I know I’m way behind on this. I’m kind of surprised at how little attention it has received. Maybe I need to refresh my portal-based news feeds. In any case, earlier this Summer, JBoss and eXo announced they would be combining the JBoss Portlet Container with eXo Portal to create a new project called GateIn. Other than the similarity between the concepts “portal” and “gate” I’m not sure what they are going for with the name, but don’t let that throw you off. To get an idea of what it’s about, check out the demo.

Most of our clients looking for open source Java portals have been interested in either JBoss Portal or Liferay. In choosing between the two, one consideration was that, historically, JBoss Portal has been less about out-of-the-box portlets and flashy UI and more about providing a presentation framework. Clients developing solutions that were really 100% custom apps with a portal-like interface leaned toward JBoss Portal (especially if they were already a JBoss shop). Clients looking for more of an “instant community” with ease-of-use on the configuration side and a large number of out-of-the-box portlets leaned more toward Liferay. GateIn appears to be a big step forward for JBoss Portal in terms of the user experience for portal administration and makes JBoss Portal about more than just a framework for presentation services.

Beyond requiring a great user experience for both end users (site consumers) and portal administrators (content managers), portals must also have a fast and intuitive development model. I think this is especially true lately as lighter-weight presentation frameworks have become more popular. As the difference in capabilities between portal and non-portal presentation frameworks becomes less and less, portals can’t afford to offer a soul-sucking development experience.

I haven’t spent any time customizing GateIn so I can’t comment on the developer experience. What I do know is that when you move from developing code using lightweight frameworks like Drupal or Django to Java portal servers like Liferay, you feel the increased complexity immediately. Anti-Java-ites will say that a lot of the complexity in the development experience is there because it’s Java and it will always be that way. I don’t think that’s true–look at frameworks like Grails and Wicket.

The point is, for GateIn to be a serious challenger to Liferay, they’ll need to provide not only the eye candy on the front-end, but also a developer experience that approaches the productivity level we can get with non-portal frameworks. If they can do that, they have a chance against Liferay. Of course even if they manage to do that, they are still up against the “Do we really need a portal server to do this?” undercurrent that threatens both projects. But that’s another blog post.

10 comments

  1. Antonio says:

    Sure. It must simply work as expected.

    A portal server is a platform, not a solution… The Liferay guys don’t understand this, and provide a lot of OOTB (very simple) portlets that are a pain to customize, when they should put focus on the platform itself.

    I completely agree with this blogger: http://sadsoftware.blogspot.com/search/label/Liferay

    PS: Jeff, I have your Alfresco book. Good work: very useful and well written.

  2. Jeff Brown says:

    Besides the much upgraded user experience, GateIn also offers a full-fledged enterprise JCR that is cluster-able – something you did not get OOB with JBoss Portal where you would then normally have to plug/interface a separate product like Alfresco or Day CRX as a repository.

    BTW – “soul-sucking development experience.” made me chuckle it is so on the mark.

  3. Karega McCoy says:

    I have just begun using Alfresco and I am having many issue shifting to the paradigm. Simply put, I am wondering instead of developing my own forward facing pages with Alfresco as the content repository, or should I just implement one of these portal ‘servers’ and skin it to provide the look and feel I need.

    Someone please advise.

  4. Markus says:

    “Do we really need a portal server to do this?”
    Please write this post. I am very curious about your findings and insights as you work a lot in the alfresco/portal space.

    In my experience the standard portlets are never good/customizable enough for the client needs and if you need to rewrite all the stuff, why not start with a good CMS (alfresco ;-)) and a top edge component oriented web dev framework (tapestry in my case).

    However the hard part is to explain that you then “officially” have no longer a “standard” solution but a custom solution.

    Soon I will start a new project where the customer looks forward to a portal stack where I would argue that Alfresco+web framework is a much better choice. So I appreciate every material/arguments to convince him about the lightweight approach.

  5. jpotts says:

    That’s a tough one to answer broadly because it depends on a lot of factors. A thorough list is impossible to provide here, but some of the things you need to think about are:

    • What kind of content do you need to manage?
    • How do you want to manage the content?
    • What kind of site are you building?
    • How does your content need to be shared across multiple properties, if at all?
    • Who’s managing the content? What skills do they have? What tools do use?
    • Will metadata be important and how will you use it?
    • What are you doing for search?
    • Will scale (of users or content) be an issue?
    • What other apps/services do you need to integration with, if any, and what is the nature of that integration?
    • What kind of security model do you need (from both a producer and a consumer standpoint)?

    Alfresco tends to do better in these situations:

    • You are managing a lot of file- or document-based content
    • Your content goes through potentially complex workflows (or at least more than just “show this on the web site/don’t show this on the web site”)
    • You need an enterprise-wide repository for document management in general, with a subset of that data needing to be surfaced through your web site
    • Your authors need thick client authoring integration via CIFS (authoring tools or file manager tools like Windows Explorer treat the repository as a file share)
    • You have multiple or disparate front-ends that need to access one or more content stores in a standard way (CMIS) or at least in a lightweight and flexible way (Web Scripts)

    You might consider alternatives when:

    • You want an “instant”, “theme-and-go”, web site
    • You are doing something small
    • You want to select from a large library of pluggable components to assemble your web site
    • You want someone to provide presentation services for you (framework, layout, page flow, user registration, user profiles, personalization)
    • You do not need/value complete and total separation of “site presentation” from “content repository”

    Hope that helps,

    Jeff

  6. Markus says:

    Thanks Jeff. You made a lot of good points here.
    The project has not yet started so I have no answers yet.

    However what are the alternatives?
    All portals I have seen fail on the WCM area. Especially the review of newly created pages and added portlets in a WCM workflow. And most of them offer an awful developer experience.

    I have yet to review some other WCMs and what they offer in terms of presentation services.

    Thanks again,
    Markus

  7. maruti says:

    hi jeff,

    Interesting thing, the GateIn UI is Excellent. but when it come to integration GateIn and Alfresco (eXO’s competitor 😉 ).GateIn proposing CIMS. will it works.

    -other side both GateIn portal and eXo are tightly integrated,So lot of business use cases can be fulfilled with out lot of sweat.But with other CMS still the question/confusion lies there!.

  8. jacob says:

    Hi – Am I missing something? I have downloaded exo portal and it seems like a richer version of GateIn.

    i.e creating sites/pages/content out of the box doesnt seem to be in Gatein?

  9. Damien says:

    Hi Jacob – not yet as GateIn is the basic Portal solution, and core of both exo and Jboss future portal solutions.. although i ‘ve seen that exo would be having all its apps ( Web CMs for web/pages creation – collaboration etc.. integrated in gatein in June or smthg..
    exoportal is nice, cant wait to migrate it all on gatin

  10. Nicol says:

    I have been evaluating eXo Platform and Liferay – do you have any technical information on their solution, and about GateIn?

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