Liferay open source portal gets some Sun

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Among the many projects that Sun Microsystems started that have been left in the dust by new owner Oracle, is a portal system built on the open source Liferay project.

Former Sun/Oracle exec Paul Hinz  is now at Liferay and is helping the commercial company push forward both the open source project as well as its enterprise offshoots. This week Liferay announced a series of new initiatives including a collaboration platform called Liferay Live and a new enterprise social collaboration offering called Social Office Enterprise Edition.

Both products leverage the existing Liferay Portal 5.2.3 technology that the open source community has benefited from already.

What interests me is the new Liferay Alloy UI which was built in collaboration with Yahoo’s YUI project. What Alloy UI provides is a way for developers to leverage  widgets to develop portals or even standalone web apps.

It’s a neat idea that could benefit other developments efforts too. When I asked Hinz about AlloyUI as an open source effort, he noted that it could be picked up by other projects too.