Spring Portlets with Liferay server or Websphere Portlet Factory?

Question

Any recommendation to to go with Spring Portlets with Liferay server or Websphere Portlet Factory? I am assuming Websphere portlet factory solution expedites portlet development BUT NOT sure from maintenance point of view. Any personal experience utilising these two technology stacks?

Additional information: We have good knowledge of spring MVC and we already have corporate license for Websphere portlet factory.

Answer 1

In my experience, WebSphere Portlet Factory might be alright for putting together a lot of cookie-cutter portlets, but is awful to debug. You don't have direct access to the code that it generates, so, when you see stack traces in that code, its difficult to figure out what's going on.

Moreover, you end up being very limited to whatever that within WPF's paradigm, and things get tough when you have to do something outside of its boundaries. You get a lot more flexibility with Spring Portlet MVC, including the advantage that the skills you are using have application outside of the strict, portal context.

Answer 2

The problem with any portal framework is that they lock you in with their custom extensions whenever you venture outside JSR 168 (and you'll want to).

I think you'll minimize lockin with Liferay.

Another suggestion would be to forego portlets altogether and use HTML, CSS, and Ajax. You won't be locked into a vendor that way.

Portlets are so 1990s. What are they really buying you?